Good Ideas Do Not Coalesce 
 First thing: do not read the back-cover book description in advance. It gives away at least two important plot points that the author does not reveal until well after page 100. It also offers an interpretation of the novel as a riff on a familiar fairy story. While this is plausible, and the unusual nature of the writing certainly demands some inventive explanation, it is also too limiting. Readers deserve a chance to enter Oyeyemi's strange world on their own, and reach their own understanding. 
 Boy. Snow. Bird. All three are names of young women. Yes, even Boy, the novel's protagonist. Boy Novak, in her late teens in 1953, runs away from her abusive father, a rat-catcher in Lower Manhattan, and takes the first bus she finds at Port Authority Terminal, which gets her to Flax Hill in Massachusetts. I can't say that this setting really comes alive--a town of artisans, apparently, that also happens to be the terminal of an interstate bus route--but the people that Boy becomes involved with soon spring to vibrant life. There is a fellow lodger at her boarding house that takes her on double dates, an Italian-American journalist she meets on the crew of a party boat, the old lady who owns the bookshop where she works. All women. There are men in the story too, but increasingly it becomes a story about women and women's relationships of all kinds, first horizontal among peers, and then vertical, involving mothers and grandmothers, and children--especially when the time leaps forward by a dozen years and Boy's daughter Bird takes over the narration, in a delightfully infectious voice. 
 I mentioned that fairy story. I won't say which one, though actually there are elements of several. The book begins with a wonderful passage about Boy standing between two mirrors and seeing herself reflected countless times, and mirrors do odd things with several of the women in the story, either not reflecting them, or showing them altered in some way. Then there is the odd business of a person's right hand not having the same mind as her left. Many of the women in the story, at different times, get described as having a special power, or even feeding on unhappiness or evil, though this is seldom fully explained. I never fully came to grips with the third title character, Snow, for example; one had to accept that there was something strange about her without ever being able to put a finger on what it was. 
 Normally, I don't like fantasy. But Oyeyemi uses it so sparingly that for the most part I was intrigued rather than alienated. But it is not sufficient as a means for holding this novel together. Indeed, were I rating solely on narrative structure, I could not give more than two stars. For Oyeyemi tackles some pretty major themes in this novel, not least of them sexuality and race. Her choice of the latter subject especially, in the setting of pre-Civil-Rights-Act America, requires a much stronger anchor in reality. Not only could I not believe in Flax Hill, I never felt that the novel was truly grounded in an America where these things hurt. I could not forget that the author was writing neither about her own country nor her own time. But she does create some interesting characters and, believable or not, she keeps coming up with delightful surprises.