Helen Oyeyemi's novel "Boy, Snow, Bird" is, about Boy Novak who arrives in a small town in Massachusetts, looking for beauty, the opposite of the life she left behind in New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow Whitman. 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 lightskinned African Americans. Among them, Boy, Snow, and Bird confront the tyranny of the mirror to ask how much power surfaces really hold.