Set in the American South during the Jim Crow era, Tayari Jones’s Kin follows the parallel lives of Annie and Vernice. The ‘cradle friends’ are both motherless, Annie having been abandoned and ‘Niecy’ orphaned, leaving them with a painful ‘wound’. They are as vulnerable as ‘unshucked, naked peas’.

Though they are trauma-bonded, the ways in which they approach their lives differ hugely. As her mother is still somewhere out there, Annie becomes fixated on finding her and ‘trying to climb back in her womb’. She’s unable to move forward until she arrives at a resolution. Tracking her mother down becomes ‘the point of her whole life’ – much to Niecy’s dismay: ‘Finding your mama won’t fix you.’ But Niecy’s resistance to Annie’s quest seems in part to reflect her reluctance to give up on the pain they share: ‘What if Annie repaired the hole in her dam with concrete and straw, whereas I was still using my finger?’

These varying types of motherlessness paint Annie and Vernice in very different tones. Annie has been abandoned and is therefore shameful, while orphaned Niecy is pitiable and tragic. Niecy’s response to her humble origins is to move forward, make the best of things and, to put a rather judgmental spin on it, social climb.

While the title suggests that the book is about family (blood or otherwise), in fact Kin seems more concerned with class. From similar starting points, Niecy and Annie’s paths diverge, due to their interactions with respectability politics. While Niecy manages to ‘“I do” [her] way into a better life’, Annie has a far more difficult time. Jones seems to be asking whether it is your family that helps you find a place in the world or your class. Are your ‘kin’ those you grew up with or those who are on your social level now?

But although Niecy is something of a class traitor, she remains loyal to Annie above all else, never truly turning her back on her roots. Making the life choices she has seems merely a pragmatic solution in an imperfect world. To draw a perhaps overreaching comparison, by portraying Niecy’s more traditional life as quietly subversive, Jones may be making a comment on her own work, too. In essence, this is a surprisingly traditional novel. But it could be argued that, in being so outwardly conventional, it manages to overturn expectations and maintain a quiet power.