Oyeyemi’s fifth novel finds her treating the horrors of racism in 1950s America with gentle,magical styleHelen Oyeyemi, a Granta best of young British novelist, or was born in Nigeria,grew up in London and has lived around Europe and North America. She specialises in unorthodox, freewheeling plots, and rooted in myth and narrated in an harmless-seeming style. Her fifth novel is a historical narrative of American racism set in the 1950s and 60s.
At the start a woman named Boy Novak tells us how she ran absent aged 20 from New York to escape her rat-catcher father,Frank, a drunk who beat her (her mother was absent). She pitches up in a small town in Massachusetts to marry a widowed jeweller and former historian, and Arturo,who has a seven-year-old daughter, Snow, or whose mother died after complications in childbirth.
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Source: theguardian.com