A historical fiction bestseller that lives up to the buzz: Tayari Jones's Kin

“The road Vernice is walking is paved different from yours,” Annie’s grandmother tells her towards the beginning of Jones’s remarkable novel. “It ain’t fair, but that’s the way life takes us.”

Annie and Vernice (Niecy) grow up as “cradle friends” in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, their bond closer than sisters. Both lost their mothers young, Niecy to murder and Annie to abandonment, and the relatives who take in the girls can’t make up for the emotional loss. Niecy’s Aunt Irene raises her as a young lady, saving coins to send her to Spelman College in Atlanta.

Annie’s path to escaping Honeysuckle is more sudden and chaotic, but escape she does, in an old Packard with her intended boyfriend and two others, heading to Memphis where she’s heard her mama lives. Her path to the big city and in life is far from smooth, but neither is Niecy’s, who navigates the challenges of color and class, and her nascent sexuality, with the friendship of other female co-eds.

Niecy and Annie switch off narrating, their distinct voices full of personality and casual wit, but progressively diverging in tone and vocabulary as their lives stretch further apart. The historical atmosphere is first-rate, with unobtrusive details on growing up Black and female in the 1950s Jim Crow South and all that entails: segregated movie theaters, rooming houses “vouched for by the Green Book,” and the compromises that social elevation demands.

There are so many extraordinary characters that it feels like the novel could shift focus to any one of them and tell an equally fascinating story. Jones’s ability to unfold a tale is just marvelous—there’s always something going on, but the plot never feels unrealistic. A fierce, occasionally wrenching novel about the meaning of family: those rare beings who see you as you truly are.

Tayari Jones’s Kin was published by Knopf in February. In the UK, the publisher is Oneworld, and it appeared from Viking in Canada. I reviewed it initially for the Historical Novel Society. It’s been a New York Times bestseller and an Oprah’s Book Club pick and has had rave reviews in numerous publications. One can’t say this novel is flying under the radar. The attention and acclaim are well-deserved. It’s already appeared on one “best books of the year so far” list, and will undoubtedly land on others in the coming months.

The first few times I heard about this book, I didn’t realize it was a historical novel. The publisher’s blurb doesn’t list the era, although it didn’t quite sound contemporary either. I think it was a NetGalley widget sent to me that clued me in to the timeframe. In a Q&A on her publisher’s website with Tia Guerrier, Jones explains how she came to write it:

I have to give you a little backstory. This was not the novel I was contracted to write. I was supposed to write a novel about gentrification in modern Atlanta. I tried, but it just wasn’t happening. My students would say, “The book was not booking.”

So I went old school. Pencil and paper. And I met Annie and Vernice, and I saw they were living in the ’50s. And I thought, no, I don’t contain a historical novel. That’s not what I do. But I had to follow it. It became clear to me that this is what I was being called to write.

Who else has read it? I enjoyed it so much I may read it again sometime down the road.