(S)Kin
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- 12,99 €
Publisher Description
A FINALIST FOR THE 2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
SIX STARRED REVIEWS
A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection
From award-winning, New York Times bestselling author Ibi Zoboi comes her groundbreaking contemporary fantasy debut—a novel in verse based on Caribbean folklore—about the power of inherited magic and the price we must pay to live the life we yearn for.
“Our new home with its
thick walls and locked doors
wants me to stay trapped in my skin—
but I am fury and flame.”
Fifteen-year-old Marisol is the daughter of a soucouyant. Every new moon, she sheds her skin like the many women before her, shifting into a fireball witch who must fly into the night and slowly sip from the lives of others to sustain her own. But Brooklyn is no place for fireball witches with all its bright lights, shut windows, and bolt-locked doors.… While Marisol hoped they would leave their old traditions behind when they emigrated from the islands, she knows this will never happen while she remains ensnared by the one person who keeps her chained to her magical past—her mother.
Seventeen-year-old Genevieve is the daughter of a college professor and a newly minted older half sister of twins. Her worsening skin condition and the babies’ constant wailing keep her up at night, when she stares at the dark sky with a deep longing to inhale it all. She hopes to quench the hunger that gnaws at her, one that seems to reach for some memory of her estranged mother. When a new nanny arrives to help with the twins, a family secret connecting her to Marisol is revealed, and Gen begins to find answers to questions she hasn’t even thought to ask.
But the girls soon discover that the very skin keeping their flames locked beneath the surface may be more explosive to the relationships around them than any ancient magic.
Finalist for the National Book Award
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
After reading this compelling YA fantasy, you’ll burn to know more about two teenagers trying to cope with a fraught magical heritage in present-day Brooklyn. Marisol, freshly arrived from the Caribbean, cannot quite connect with her new home, focused as she is with concealing her true nature from everyone. During the new moon, she sheds her skin and flies in the night sky as a creature of fire who consumes the life force of humans. Genevieve, a biracial young woman raised by her white father and stepmother, is made restless by the new twin babies in the house, her constantly itching and painful skin, and her dreams of fire, flight, and hunger. When Marisol’s mother is hired as a nanny for Genevieve’s new half-siblings, the lives of these two young women intersect and combust. Author Ibi Zoboi’s novel in verse is gorgeously lyrical and deeply emotional, blossoming into a powerful song of how to come to terms with complex personal identity, the toxicity of colourism, and fraught family ties.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fifteen-year-old Marisol—a soucouyant, or shape-shifting witch, who turns into a flying fireball once a month and feeds on other people's life forces—longs to escape her magical legacy and wishes she could have a different life. Far away from the monsters and myths back home in the Caribbean and trying to forge a new path in New York City, she and her mother eke out an existence working at a bakery owned by their boss and landlord, Jean-Pierre. Meanwhile, Genevieve, a 17-year-old Black and white dancer living with a painful skin condition that keeps her up at night, struggles to juggle the demands of high school and her boyfriend Micah's jealousy. The arrival of a new nanny for her white father and stepmother's twin newborns compels Genevieve to discover a hidden connection to her absent mother, her cultural roots, and Marisol. Using gripping verse, Zoboi (Nigeria Jones) delves into each teen's inner turmoil, tackling themes of misogynoir, colorism, and immigration via complicated mother-daughter dynamics. The girls' shifting perspectives appear on alternating sides of the book's pages, only combining once they meet; an ambiguous resolution rounds out this searing exploration of personal growth and self-discovery. Ages 13–up.
