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 Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her 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, culminating in a battle for her life.
Jones maintains a light touch and a gift for effortless portraiture ... Such is the bittersweet power of fiction, that it can braid two friends’ lives together, bridging their separation. When the two women reunite, the novel makes good on the promise of its title, testing the bonds and boundaries of the kin we choose ... [Jones'] repertoire of characters feels inexhaustible, in the best way — as if she could go on for decades populating her fictional universe with women and men at once wholly unique and also bound by their author’s sensibility and purpose. When reading Kin, I wanted nothing more than to keep reading it.
With understated force, Ms. Jones captures the systemic racism of the Jim Crow era in the years when the civil-rights movement was gaining momentum ... Loyalties and fortitude are repeatedly tested in this immersive drama. Resilience abounds.
While some writers lead with a strong beginning only to grow slack as the novel wears on, struggling to land the ending, Jones is the opposite. Her momentum picks up steam as it goes ... Confident ... As the novel’s turbulent action finds an affecting and spectral finale, we’re left with an abiding undercurrent of platonic love as Jones forges a graceful dignity for Niecy and Annie.
