Two Motherless Girls, One Enduring Bond

 

Kin  —  Tayari Jones

Tayari Jones's follow-up to An American Marriage returns to the American South to tell the story of Vernice and Annie, two girls raised without their mothers in the fictional town of Honeysuckle, Louisiana, whose lifelong closeness carries them through very different adult lives, Vernice into an affluent marriage after Spelman College, Annie into a search for the mother who left her, before a shared tragedy pulls them back together.

Jones has described the book as a blend of Sula and Beaches, and that combination shows in the way the novel balances the interior intensity of a decades-long friendship against a wider social canvas, class mobility, the Civil Rights era, the particular vulnerabilities faced by Black women navigating institutions not built for them. The prose is warm without softening the harder material, and Jones's ear for dialogue, a strength in her earlier work, carries much of the book's emotional weight.

Some readers have wanted more from the novel's ending relative to the patience of its build, and the dual-track structure occasionally gives one storyline more room to breathe than the other. As a portrait of a friendship sustained across real distance and real loss, though, it's an emotionally substantial addition to Jones's body of work.

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