Apr 29

Apr 29 When We Were Birds

Author: Ayanna Lloyd Banwo
Publisher: Doubleday
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

A mythic love story set in Trinidad and Tobago, Ayanna Lloyd Banwo's radiant debut introduces two unforgettable outsiders brought together by their connection with the dead.

You were never the smartest child, but even you should know that when a dead woman offers you a cigarette, the polite thing to do would be to take it. Especially when that dead woman is your mother.

The St. Bernard women have lived in Morne Marie, the house on top of a hill outside Port Angeles, for generations. Built from the ashes of a plantation that enslaved their ancestors, it has come to shelter a lineage that is bonded by much more than blood. One woman in each generation of St. Bernards is responsible for the passage of the city's souls into the afterlife. But Yejide's relationship with her mother, Petronella, has always been contorted by anger and neglect, which Petronella stubbornly carries to her death bed, leaving Yejide unprepared to fulfill her destiny.

Raised in the countryside by a devout Rastafarian mother, Darwin has always abided by the religious commandment not to interact with death. He has never been to a funeral, much less seen a dead body. But when his ailing mother can no longer work and the only job he can find is grave digging, he must betray the life she built for him in order to provide for them both. Newly shorn of his dreadlocks and his past and determined to prove himself, Darwin finds himself adrift in a city electric with possibility and danger.

Yejide and Darwin will meet inside the gates of Fidelis, Port Angeles's largest and oldest cemetery, where the dead lie uneasy in their graves and a reckoning with fate beckons them both. A masterwork of lush imagination and immersive lyricism, When We Were Birds is a spellbinding novel about inheritance, loss, and love's seismic power to heal.

TL;DR Review

When We Were Birds — a modern, imaginative, and more literary take on the classic love story — is a quick, captivating standalone. I really liked it.

For you if: You like literary magical realism and /or want to read more books set in the Caribbean.

Full Review

Thank you, Doubleday, for the gifted copy of this book! With some SERIOUS blurb power (Marlon James, Robert Jones Jr., Pat Barker, Avni Doshi, and others) When We Were Birds is exactly the kind of novel I tend to love — literary, but touched with magic. So it’s no surprise that I enjoyed this book very, very much.

Set in Trinidad and Tobago, the story is about two characters: Yejide, a young woman who is last in a line of women who help pass souls into the afterlife (literally — magically), and Darwin, a young Rastafarian man left with no options but to take a job at a graveyard, despite the fact that it goes against his religion. So begins their intertwined fates.

It took me a few days to relax into this one, but I think that was a me/brain space thing and not a book thing. Once I did, I was off — in fact, by the end, I was surprised by how fast the pace had felt. I read most of it in a single Amtrak ride, and it was perfectly suited for that kind of thing. It’s got that quick, immersive love-story feeling alongside that deeper literary feeling. All while completely transporting us into this fictional city and into these characters’ lives and hearts.

Finally, this is a book where I very much recommend listening to the audiobook as you read along — the voice performances by Sydney Darius and Wendell Manwarren really brought the characters, the story, and the setting to life.

A beautiful debut. I can’t wait to see what Ayanna Lloyd Banwo writes next.