Kin review by Tayari Jones – A painful story about motherhood | books

ANene and Vernice (or Nessie, as Annie calls her) are “cradle friends”, growing up in their hometown of Honeysuckle, Louisiana, in 1950s America. The heroes are defined by their lack of motherhood and their divergent motivations to escape their individual tragedies and pre-written destinies. In this haunting novel of motherhood and sisterhood, Tayari Jones writes about ignorance—how well we can know another person, or indeed ourselves.

The pair, who speak in alternating chapters, are “not the same, but still the same.” Each is cared for by maternal figures – grandmothers and aunts – and each gives meaning to the other’s isolated and questioning existence: “When you don’t have your mother, you don’t really know who you are.” Annie’s mother has abandoned her but seems to live in Memphis, and is making reconciliation with her her obsession; Niecy’s, on the other hand, was lost forever, killed by Niecy’s father. Where the former has hope, the latter has none; Here lies the thorn in their future. As Niecy chooses a sensible, stable life path—college, traditional marriage—Annie moves from tragedy to tragedy, lost in thoughts of her lost mother. We call it fate, or a kind of sadness.

Jones’s idiomatic, hypnotic prose draws you in, and she playfully stitches tropes of twinning, doubling, and frustration throughout the novel, lightening the gloom and making the plot twists shine. “Some truths are too bitter to leave on your tongue,” we are told. Unforgiving violence and melodrama are kept off the page as the pair navigate racial and class fault lines (there’s an incident on a bus, another in a laundromat, where Jones shows remarkable restraint). She reuses the epistolary device in her Women’s Prize-winning novel, An American Marriage, to glue women together through words as the years tear them apart in different directions. When they finally meet again, will they learn who they are, now with a new set of secrets? “I struggled to decide whether Secrets and Lies were twins, regular sisters, or just cousins.”

Ultimately, the novel explains what happens when you love selflessly, endlessly, unrequited, in the dark; When a mother’s love, or its absence, turns into a poison and a parasite; And when a mother’s love, which is supposed to nourish and sustain your soul, drains and destroys it (“Everything requires water to live. But not too much. That’s the paradox of water. You need it, but it can kill you”). By turns, Keene’s novel is brisk and profound, a cautionary tale about the limits of love, both given and received: “Love, I learned, was the responsibility of the person who loved. The other person didn’t necessarily have to contribute to the soup.” “This is why you have to be careful who you give it to. They can put your love in their back pocket and never give it back.”

Is there a loss more fundamental, or a rift more severe, than that caused by the loss of the person who gave you life? “Sadness is a kind of spell” and with Kane, Jones throws one at her readers, leaving us with the certainty that something has stirred within our souls—quietly, almost unknowingly.