Kin
Jones maintains a light touch and a gift for effortless portraiture ... Such is the bittersweet power of fiction, that it can braid two friends’ lives together, bridging their separation. When the two women reunite, the novel makes good on the promise of its title, testing the bonds and boundaries of the kin we choose ... [Jones'] repertoire of characters feels inexhaustible, in the best way — as if she could go on for decades populating her fictional universe with women and men at once wholly unique and also bound by their author’s sensibility and purpose. When reading Kin, I wanted nothing more than to keep reading it.
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With understated force, Ms. Jones captures the systemic racism of the Jim Crow era in the years when the civil-rights movement was gaining momentum ... Loyalties and fortitude are repeatedly tested in this immersive drama. Resilience abounds.
Incisive and thoughtful ... Jones does impressively delicate work highlighting the constrictive gender mores of the 1950s and ’60s ... Striking ... Old-fashioned in its steely portrait of class as an arbiter of fate ... Jones’s emotional directness lends her prose a deep warmth that could trick the reader into believing she’ll allow her heroines a happy ending ... Shattering.
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