by Tayari Jones
4.8 · 4 reviewsVernice 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.
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.
4 reviews
The search for Annie's mother becomes the spine of everything. There's a scene near the end I've reread three times. Please read this one.
I found myself rushing through Vernice's sections to get back to Annie on the road. That's probably a compliment to the writing but it did make the book feel uneven for me.
What Jones does better than almost anyone is show how much of a life is decided by who was there to catch you. Vernice had an aunt. Annie didn't. The book never moralizes about it and that restraint is what wrecked me.
Vernice and Annie's lives splitting apart is the whole book and it's almost unbearable to watch. Honeysuckle, Louisiana is drawn so specifically I could smell it. The Spelman chapters are wonderful.