(S)Kin

Finalist, National Book Awards 2025 for Young People's Literature

ISBN 9780062888877
Versify / HarperCollins Publishers
Ibi Zoboi

Ibi Zoboi is the New York Times bestselling author of American Street, a National Book Award Finalist; Nigeria Jones, a Coretta Scott King Book Award winner; Pride; My Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich; Okoye to the People: A Black Panther Novel for Marvel; and the Walter Dean Myers Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winning Punching the Air, co-written with Exonerated Five member Yusef Salaam. More about this author >

Award Years

Award Status

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.

Judges Citation

In the poetic spellcraft of (S)Kin, Ibi Zoboi fuses Caribbean myth, New York City grit, and lyrical urgency. Two young women— one an undocumented immigrant, the other biracial and searching—are bound by ancestral magic, colorism, and the body’s betrayals. With daring form and nail-biting suspense, Zoboi interrogates skin, perception, class, and power, tracing how mothers and daughters inherit—and resist—the same wounds. Sly, wise, and haunting, this genre-bending novel-in-verse reminds us how much our bodies and histories demand to be seen.

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Ibi Zoboi at the 2025 National Book Awards Finalist Reading

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