Told in alternating points of view, the narrative threads weave together as the girls discover friendship, family, and love. Even when geographically separated, Niecy and Annie remain fiercely connected and devoted to each other through constant letter writing. Tayari Jones's secondary characters are wonderfully well-developed, and the relationships throughout the book feel entirely authentic.
Ultimately, it is the emotional core of the book that stands out. As a motherless daughter myself, I found that the bottomless longing Jones describes rang entirely true.
From the publisher:
Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood, but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Atlanta at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and marries into an affluent family. Annie, abandoned by her dissolute mother as a child, and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, and culminate in a battle for her life.
A novel about mothers and daughters, about friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction.
