Kin
Shine all the spotlights on Tayari Jones for gracing us with another masterpiece.
Her writing just has this magical and special way of feeling like the output of her placing all these fabulous turns of phrases, slices of deep wisdom gussied up for us laypeople, and extravagantly detailed characters into a shaker and then tumbling all of it out on a table. And that output, by the way, is a perfectly formed, assembled, and clicked-together puzzle of a story.
This saga of Niecy and Annie, two motherless “cradle friends” from Louisiana and their attempts at settling in Memphis and Atlanta as they each grapple with their own paths forward, echoes — at times — that great line from Jones’ last triumph, An American Marriage: “But home isn’t where you land; home is where you launch.”
The first pages of that 2018 novel provided the opening reading for my first Book Covers event in 2019. Last month, I read those words myself at a very small-scale version of the same in our home. I loved — and continue to love — An American Marriage. So I can confidently proclaim that this one — Kin — is absolutely worth the wait.
originally published on instagram