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“My first word was ‘mother,’ spoken out loud and with texture. MOTHER. There was a host of witnesses, including Aunt Irene, who called out for God and considered running down the block to fetch the pastor. But before she could even straighten her skirt, she decided that this wasn’t a pot to be stirred by any man’s spoon.” — “Kin” by Tayari Jones

That is how Tayari Jones opens “Kin” (an Oprah’s Book Club selection earlier this year), and it tells you everything you need to know about what kind of novel you are holding. Bold. Funny. Fierce. And completely in command of its own voice.

Jones, bestselling author of “An American Marriage,” has written a story that feels less like something you read and more like something that happens to you. Set in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, beginning in the years after World War II, “Kin” follows two motherless girls, Vernice and Annie, who grow up as cradle mates and best friends before the world pulls them in entirely different directions.

Vernice, steadied by a fierce and determined aunt, leaves for Spelman College in Atlanta, where she builds a life of stability and status among a sisterhood of powerful Black women.

Annie, abandoned by a mother she cannot stop searching for, sets off on a far more dangerous path, one that will take her through peril, love, and a battle for her own survival.

Jones tells their story in dual perspectives, and the structure is a quiet act of genius. These are two fully distinct voices, two fully distinct lives, and yet the thread between them never breaks. What Jones captures so precisely is the particular weight of a female friendship forged in shared loss.

Vernice and Annie do not simply love each other. They are, in some fundamental way, each other’s proof of survival. Jones also brings nuance and tenderness to questions of sexual identity and self-discovery, threading them through the narrative without spectacle or agenda. It is the kind of representation that feels lived-in rather than performed, and readers looking for stories that reflect the full complexity of women’s inner lives will find that here.

The novel is unflinching about the world these women inhabit.

As Black women in the American South, they navigate a society that diminishes them on multiple fronts simultaneously, and Jones never lets the reader look away from that reality. The racial violence and misogyny embedded in the fabric of their lives are not a backdrop. They are the terrain. At the same time, Jones writes with such warmth and specificity that “Kin” never feels like a document of suffering. It feels like a celebration of what people build and protect and carry for each other despite everything.

There is also something here that will resonate with any woman regardless of background: the demand to be useful rather than whole, to be valuable on someone else’s terms rather than your own. Jones holds that universal thread alongside the particular experiences of her characters without ever flattening either one.

“Kin” is exuberant and devastating, intimate and expansive. It is the work of a writer at the height of her powers, and it is not a book you will forget.

Kara Sandoval is the event coordinator and a bookseller at Books on the Bosque, located at 6261 Riverside Plaza Lane, Suite A-2, or at .