Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi

14 July 2014: This book started out great. It's broken up into 3 parts and the first part is the one I liked. The latter 2 parts seemed a bit disconnected from the first. Maybe that was the intention of the author, Helen Oyeyemi, since she told the second part from a different point of view from the first part. Boy is the daughter of an abusive rat catcher in NYC and ran away when she was a teenager. She ends up in a New England city and meets a man whom at first she doesn't care for. The man, Arturo, becomes her husband and Boy becomes a stepmom to his beautiful daughter Snow. When Arturo and Boy have their own child she is named Bird. She is also brown; exposing the secret Arturo's family has tried to hide for years. 

In the second part, Bird is a teenager and she writes letters to Snow hoping to form some kind of relationship. Snow was sent to live with her aunt in the South shortly after Bird's birth. Bird goes through the normal teenage stuff dealing with boys and insecurities. She ends up meeting a stranger who turns out to not be so much of a stranger. The third part is where I completely got lost and wished the book would end. This part is about the mother, Boy but it seemed abstract to me. It didn't seem cohesive with the rest of the book. I pushed through it just to finish the book. It's a short section but it annoyed me. All in all the book isn't bad, I just expected more.