Book of the Day

From the review

Vernice and Annie grow up next door to each other in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, both of them raising themselves in the wreckage their mothers left behind, and Tayari Jones never lets you forget that the two girls started as mirror images of each other even as their lives pull apart at the seams. Vernice gets the aunt who insists on stability, then Spelman, then a marriage that looks like arrival from the outside. Annie gets nothing so tidy: she goes looking for the mother who left her, and the book follows her into rooms that are considerably more dangerous than anything in Vernice's version of growing up. Jones writes both halves with the same unhurried attention, refusing to let one girl's story read as the reward track and the other's as the cautionary one. What makes the novel work is how physical Jones's sense of class is. A kitchen table, a sorority sisterhood, the particular arithmetic of who gets invited where and who doesn't: these aren't backdrop, they're the whole argument. Vernice's chapters have a kind of nervous comedy running underneath them, the humor of a woman who has learned to read a room before she's said a word in it. Annie's chapters carry more weight and less air, and Jones is patient with that difference instead of rushing to close the gap between the two women's fortunes. When the book finally does pull them back into the same room, it doesn't feel like a plot mechanism clicking into place. It feels like two people who never really stopped being each other's oldest witness.