Ibis
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A bold, witty, magical new voice in fiction, Justin Haynes weaves a cross-generational Caribbean story of migration, superstition, and a search for family in the novel Ibis.
“This brilliant, shape-shifting novel teems with charms and curses, stunning disasters and startling moments of grace.” —Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation and Weather
“Justin Haynes proves himself an absolute alchemist of fiction . . . This is a stunning debut as witty as is it is rapturous.” ―Jericho Brown, MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Tradition
“Evoking the themes of Ovid, the language of Toni Morrison, and the genre-blending of Octavia Butler, Haynes scales the heights of his ambition. This soaring work is not to be missed.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
There is bad luck in New Felicity. The people of the small coastal village have taken in Milagros, an 11-year-old Venezuelan refugee, just as Trinidad’s government has begun cracking down on undocumented migrants—and now an American journalist has come to town asking questions.
New Felicity’s superstitious fishermen fear the worst, certain they’ve brought bad luck on the village by killing a local witch who had herself murdered two villagers the year before. The town has been plagued since her death by alarming visits from her supernatural mother, as well as by a mysterious profusion of scarlet ibis birds.
Skittish that the reporter’s story will bring down the wrath of the ministry of national security, the fishermen take things into their own hands. From there, we go backward and forward in time—from the town’s early days, when it was the site of a sugar plantation, to Milagros’s adulthood as she searches for her mother across the Americas.
In between, through the voices of a chorus of narrators, we glimpse moments from various villagers’ lives, each one setting into motion events that will reverberate outwards across the novel and shape Milagros’s fate.
With kinetic, absorbing language and a powerful sense of voice, Ibis meditates on the bond between mothers and daughters, both highlighting the migrant crisis that troubles the contemporary world and offering a moving exploration of how to square where we come from with who we become.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Haynes debuts with a spectacular centuries-spanning tale of slavery and human trafficking in Trinidad and Venezuela. New Felicity, Trinidad, is cursed by blood. In the 1780s, an attempted escape by slaves on the Cruickshank sugar plantation meets with brutal reprisal: men, women, and children are slaughtered, acres of cane are burnt, families are wrenched apart, and after one woman is tortured, she magically disappears, leaving behind the feathers of a tropical ibis. In present-day New Felicity, a group of residents care for orphaned Venezuelan migrant Milagros, who seeks asylum in the U.S. with the help of a fisherwoman and eventually becomes a journalist there. Driven by a desire to discover her mother's fate, Milagros uncovers human trafficking between Venezuela and Trinidad, and learns that her mother had been sold into sexual slavery upon their arrival in Trinidad. Though Milagros has grown, the other residents of New Felicity never age, among them the survivors of the 18th-century massacre, who now seek vengeance against two traffickers who run a local brothel; the survivors also save others from oppression by transforming them into birds. Evoking the themes of Ovid, the language of Toni Morrison, and the genre-blending of Octavia Butler, Haynes scales the heights of his ambition. This soaring work is not to be missed.
Customer Reviews
A well crafted folktale
Complex storytelling of a compounding crisis that has received too little attention in the mainstream. The author masterfully shifts between cultural perspectives while connecting the many voices in Ibis with one central thread of colonial remittance, belonging, and generational trauma.