Kin by Tayari Jones

Kin by Tayari Jones

368 pages 

Published /2026 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

My copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher’s Summary: 

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.

A novel about mothers and daughters, 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.

My Thoughts: 

The Atlantic reviewer says “…Jones gives the novel the…sense of inevitable tragedy that animates Edith Wharton’s books.” As a huge fan of Wharton’s work, that would drawn me to this book. But I already knew that about Jones, having read her 2018 novel, An American Marriage. That’s the mark of a good writer – I know I’m going to have my heart broken in the end, but I want to read the book anyway. 

Vernice and Annie are more than best friends, they are sisters, inseparable no matter what the physical distance between them. Both were raised by women who were forced to mother the girls and who were afraid to bond too closely with the them. Because of the way they each became motherless, and the they were raised afterward, they are two very different people who seek healing in very different ways. 

Annie escapes town, headed north to find the mother who abandoned her. Annie doesn’t see that the people she travels with and meets along the way as a family and can’t accept the love she finds, so consumed is she in trying to finding her mother. It’s an obsession that comes with a high cost. 

Vernice escapes through education and makes her way to college in Atlanta There she meets her first love and people who will open her eyes to the Civil Rights movement. When a well-to-do woman takes Vernice under her wing, though,Vernice is convinced that the way to succeed is by marrying, settling down, and doing the "right thing." The woman becomes the mother Vernice has been seeking and soon becomes her mother-in-law as well. 

When Annie finds herself in trouble,  it's Vernice she turns to, despite  and Vernice finds that taking care of Annie is more important to her than following the rules set by society. 

Jones is one of those rare authors that makes you feel like you're in the room with these women. You can feel the emotions of the characters and see them clearly; you can picture the rooms and the roads; you can feel the tension, the fear, the nuances of the characters. Here is a story of grief, sadness, obsession, family and love that, despite the sadness the overwhelmed me throughout the book, made it impossible to put this book down.