Name: When We Were Birds
Rating: 3.583333333333333 (6 reviews)
ISBN: 9780385547260

Ayanna Lloyd Banwo

"The introduction of a singularly stunning new voice in fiction, Ayanna Gillian Lloyd's The Gatekeepers is a mythic love story set in contemporary Trinidad & Tobago about two young outsiders brought together by their connection with the dead"--

A Novel

When We Were Birds

I’ve struggled with this one. Picked it up after over a year, hoping maybe I’ll be able to make it through to the end this time. Unfortunately, the storytelling just didn’t click for me. I’ve decided to DNF.

Nana O

Sarah Sammis

The core story is the meeting of Darwin and Yejide. Darwin is a Rastafarian man who has cut his locks and moved to the big city to find work. The only work he can find is as a grave digger and security guard for the city's largest and oldest (and most haunted) cemetery. Yejide is one of a line of women whose calling in life is to help the recently departed cross over. As her mother has recently died, that role is now falling to Yejide, though she is somewhat ambivalent about her calling.

http://pussreboots.com/blog/2022/comm...

A mythic love story set in Trinidad & Tobago, Ayanna Gillian Lloyd'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 gravedigging, 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' 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, shot through with the rhythm of the island, When We Were Birds is a spellbinding novel about inheritance, loss and love's seismic power to heal.

When We Were Birds A Novel

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