(S)Kin by Ibi Zoboi
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.
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.
Expected publication February 11, 2025
Ibi Zoboi was born in Haiti and immigrated to New York with her mother when she was four-years-old.
Ibi Zoboi is the New York Times Bestselling author of AMERICAN STREET, a National Book Award Finalist; PRIDE, a contemporary remix of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; and MY LIFE AS AN ICE CREAM SANDWICH, her middle-grade debut. She is also the co-author of the Walter Award and L.A. Times Book Prize-winning PUNCHING THE AIR with prison reform activist Dr. Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five, which was also shortlisted for the U.K.’s Yoto Carnegie Medal. Ibi is the editor of BLACK ENOUGH: STORIES OF BEING YOUNG & BLACK IN AMERICA. Her debut picture book, THE PEOPLE REMEMBER, received a Coretta Scott King Book Honor Award. Her most recent books are STAR CHILD: A BIOGRAPHICAL CONSTELLATION OF OCTAVIA ESTELLE BUTLER, and OKOYE TO THE PEOPLE: A BLACK PANTHER NOVEL for Marvel.
Ibi has appeared on CBS This Morning and The Reid Out alongside Yusef Salaam, and on PBS’s Book View Now. Her writing has been published in The New York Times Book Review, the Horn Book Magazine, and The Rumpus, among others. As an educator, she received several grants from the Brooklyn Arts Council for her community-based programs for teen girls in both Brooklyn and Haiti. She’s worked for arts organizations such as Teachers & Writers Collaborative and Community Word Project as a writer-in-residence and teaching artist in New York City public schools.
Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and raised in New York City, Ibi lives with her husband and three children in Maplewood, New Jersey.
Photo credit: Nicole Mondestin Photography
https://www.ibizoboi.net/
