In Kin by Tayari Jones, two baby girls sleeping in side-by-side dresser drawers in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, grow into women whose lives diverge as sharply as a river splitting at its delta, yet whose hearts remain tangled in a knot neither time nor distance can undo. This is the kind of novel that settles into your body before your mind catches up with it.
Vernice Davis, whose first word was “mother,” is raised by her fierce Aunt Irene after her father murders her mother and botches his own death. Annie Kay Henderson is abandoned by her mother, Hattie Lee, and left to a grandmother who shelters but does not dote. From this shared wound, the two girls build a friendship that becomes the closest thing either has to kin. Jones gives us their story in alternating chapters, each narrated in a voice so distinct you could identify the speaker from a single sentence. Vernice is measured, striving to become someone whose past cannot be detected. Annie is restless, driven by a hunger so deep it has its own gravity.
Roads Taken: Atlanta’s Ambitions and Memphis’s Blues
The architecture of Kin by Tayari Jones is deceptively simple. Vernice leaves for Spelman College, where she enters a world of white-dress ceremonies, secret sisterhoods, and the particular brand of Black respectability that is equal parts armor and cage. She is adopted by the formidable Mrs. McHenry, marries into the prominent McHenry family, and begins building the stable, elegant life that Aunt Irene’s sacrifices made possible. Annie, meanwhile, runs to Memphis with a stolen Packard, a suitcase from someone else’s white folks, and a paper bearing her mother’s address. There she finds Babydoll, Clyde, and Bobo, and for a time, she finds love.
Jones renders both worlds with breathtaking specificity. Vernice’s Spelman chapters pulse with the rituals of mid-century Black institutional life: alumnae pinching stockinged legs at Founders Day, the careful protocol of the SWANs, limoncello afternoons in Mrs. McHenry’s sunroom. Annie’s Memphis is rougher music: the Elektra’s Saturday nights, cocktails mixed from memory, a river city where blues and danger share the same barstool.
What elevates the novel beyond a tale of two paths is Jones’s refusal to sentimentalize either. Vernice’s world of respectability is shown to be suffocating as often as sustaining. Mrs. McHenry’s advice to build a moat filled with alligators between yourself and “the mess” is delivered with warmth, but it is also a command to abandon Annie. The affluent Black society that embraces Vernice demands she amputate the parts of herself that do not fit.
Mothers, Ghosts, and the Hunger for Home
At the molten center of Kin by Tayari Jones is a question that has no clean answer: What do we owe the people who made us, and what do we owe ourselves when they fail?
Annie’s obsessive search for Hattie Lee is the novel’s most devastating thread. She sees her mother’s face in every woman who orders a double whiskey. She keeps the scrap of paper with Hattie Lee’s address memorized even after letting Babydoll hold it for safekeeping. Her longing is not rational, and Jones never pretends it is. When Annie writes to Vernice that loving her mama might cost her the man she loves, there is no calculation in it, only the plain truth of a wound that will not close.
Vernice’s relationship with motherhood is equally complex but quieter. She marries into the role of daughter-in-law with a devotion that borders on performance, drinking in Mrs. McHenry’s maternal affection. Her desire for children becomes tangled with her desire to prove she has arrived, that the girl from Honeysuckle has been replaced by Mrs. Franklin McHenry.
Jones handles both arcs with extraordinary compassion while maintaining a clear-eyed view of how pain distorts judgment. Annie’s pursuit of Hattie Lee pushes away the people who love her most. Vernice’s pursuit of respectability nearly costs her the one person who knows her fully.
On Voice, Craft, and the Places Where the Novel Sings
Jones is a master of voice. Her previous novels, An American Marriage, Silver Sparrow, The Untelling, and Leaving Atlanta, each demonstrated her gift for inhabiting characters whose inner lives are rich with contradiction. In Kin by Tayari Jones, she takes this further. The epistolary sections, where Annie’s letters appear as full reproductions, are among the novel’s finest achievements. Annie writes the way she talks, mixing heartbreak with gossip, theological reflection with practical instruction.
The prose carries a Southern musicality that never tips into caricature. Sentences land with the satisfying weight of proverbs long before they arrive at anything resembling a moral.
There are places, however, where the novel’s ambition slightly exceeds its structure. The alternating chapters occasionally create a stop-start rhythm that interrupts momentum, particularly in the middle sections where both storylines are in holding patterns. Vernice’s Spelman years, while beautifully rendered, sometimes linger on social detail at the expense of emotional progression. And while Jones handles the novel’s queer subplot between Vernice and her roommate Joette with sensitivity and restraint, the resolution feels rushed, folded too quickly into the machinery of Vernice’s marriage plot.
Similarly, certain secondary characters, particularly Franklin, remain somewhat opaque. He is decent, patient, and articulate about his own suffering, but he occasionally reads more as a function of the plot than as a fully breathing person. Babydoll, by contrast, leaps off every page she appears on. One wishes the novel had found room to give her even more space.
Where It Falters and Where It Holds
No honest assessment of this novel can ignore that the pacing in the second act dips. The accumulation of letters, while individually lovely, occasionally slows the narrative when it should be tightening. There are moments where Jones’s commitment to historical texture overtakes the emotional urgency of her story.
Yet these are minor grievances against a novel that achieves something rare: it makes the bonds between women feel as epic and consequential as any romance or war. The final chapters, when Annie’s crisis brings the two friends crashing back together across class and distance, are as tense and emotionally precise as anything Jones has written. The scene where Annie names Vernice as her next of kin, reciting every one of her friend’s names like a prayer, is the kind of passage that justifies an entire novel.
The Verdict: A Novel That Earns Its Title
Kin by Tayari Jones is a deeply felt, beautifully crafted exploration of what it means to belong to someone in a world that offers no guarantees. It does not romanticize friendship or motherhood. What it does, with considerable skill and even more heart, is insist that the ties we choose are as binding and sacred as the ones we are born into. Sometimes more so.
This is Jones at her most expansive and intimate, writing with the accumulated authority of a career spent listening to the frequencies at which Black women’s lives vibrate. It is not a flawless novel, but it is a necessary one, and in its finest moments, extraordinary.
Five Books for Readers Who Loved Kin
- The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor — A landmark novel-in-stories about the interconnected lives of Black women in an urban housing project, exploring friendship, survival, and community with lyrical intensity.
- Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward — Set in rural Mississippi in the days before Hurricane Katrina, this fierce novel follows a motherless girl whose resilience and longing echo Annie’s with a raw, visceral power.
- The Mothers by Brit Bennett — A story of secrets, choices, and the long shadow of a single decision on a community of women, told with the same dual-perspective intimacy Jones employs.
- A Kind of Freedom by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton — A multigenerational novel set in New Orleans that traces the bonds between Black women across decades, examining class, motherhood, and the cost of respectability.
- An American Marriage by Tayari Jones — For those encountering Jones for the first time, her previous masterwork explores love, loyalty, and injustice with the same emotional precision and unflinching honesty that define Kin.