Program Description
Event Details
Please join us for the virtual version of the Carnelian Coffee Book Group, facilitated by the Pikes Peak Library District. Multiple copies, including online, are available through PPLD.
January's selection is Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi, a 2014 recasting of the Snow White fairy tale that deals with family secrets, race, beauty and vanity.
There are quite a few physical and ebook copies available from PPLD. Since it is a 2014 novel, there are plenty of used copies available online or from a local used bookstore as well.
Here's a blurb from the publisher …
In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts looking, she believes, for beauty—the opposite of the life she’s left behind in New York. She marries Arturo Whitman, a local widower, and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow.
A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined she’d become, but elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boy’s daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African-Americans passing for white.
And even as Boy, Snow, and Bird are divided, their estrangement is complicated by an insistent curiosity about one another. In seeking an understanding that is separate from the image each presents to the world, Boy, Snow, and Bird confront the tyranny of the mirror to ask how much power surfaces really hold.
Contact me for more information, or a link and invite to the Zoom meeting at jpaisley@ppld.org.