November 9, 2026
Kin, by Tayari Jones
While I have more than a passing familiarity with both the female friendship novel, and the motherhood novel, I’ve never encountered any of either quite like Tayari Jones’ latest novel Kin. Beginning with the fact that there are no mothers, with Annie’s mother gone, and Niecy’s mother murdered, both girls marked by these absences in their hometown of Honeysuckle, Louisiana, as they’re growing up in the 1950s. The two of them are “cradle friends,” and while Annie’s grandmother and Niecy’s aunt manage to raise the girls with necessary provisions, an absence of anything close to nurturing and true affection imbues each girl with a longing for love that will define the very different but still parallel trajectories of the rest of their lives.
Annie skips town with a boyfriend, and ends up working for the owner of a brothel, and then tending bar at various joints in Memphis. Ever on the hunt for her missing mother, an obsession with finding her may prove her undoing. Clever Niecy enrols at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, seeking mobility and respectability through marriage to a civil rights lawyer, and the mothering she never had via the complicated affection of her mother-in-law. A secret from her past, however, threatens the stability she’s worked so hard for.
These friends are never far from each other’s minds over the years, and stay in touch via letters and eventual visits, Annie arriving back in Niecy’s world as a bridesmaid at her wedding, and then later again when she’s in trouble and Niecy is the only one who can help.
Vast and moving, the characters in Kin are so vividly imagined with nuance and edge—there are no villains, but nor is any character too good to be true, and there is only so much these characters can give each other anyway, only so much that can be risked as Black people making their lives in the American south—where the wrong choice of a bus seat can be read as a provocation, an incitement to violence. Except for Annie and Niecy, of course, both alone in the world, and therefore never truly alone for that, and there is no limit to how far they’d go for each other, no limit to the fathoms of their love.
