Kin by Tayari Jones
Fiction suggested by Shirley
Vernice and Annie, best friends since infancy, fated to live starkly different lives.
One to Spelman College, and one to a world of peril culminating in a battle for her life.
From Amazon – about two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart in the face of a devastating tragedy. 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 Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her 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, culminating in a battle for her life.
A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South.