Erin and I both adored Kin by Tayari Jones, and we decided to do a whole episode discussing it! The first 15ish minutes are spoiler free, so if you haven't read it yet, you can listen and decide if the vibes sound right for you. After that, we get into everything we loved about the characters, the prose, the plotting and the themes!
Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood, but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Atlanta at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and marries into an affluent family. Annie, abandoned by her dissolute mother as a child, and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, and culminate in a battle for her life.
Erin's Interview with ReShanda Tate about With Love From Harlem