When a character refers to the dual narrators of “Kin” as “crib sisters,” he’s immediately informed that the correct term is “cradle,” not “crib.” There’s a reason for that distinction, I think.

“Cradle” is the key word, as in “cradle to grave.” Vernice and Annie grew up in a small Louisiana town, both without mothers. Vernice was raised by her Aunt Irene after her father killed her mom, shortly after she was born, and Annie’s mother left her in the care of her grandmother when she was an infant. From the opening chapter of the book — in which infant Annie “bleats” while Irene is visiting and Granny says, “Our girls can be friends” — it is clear that nothing will keep Vernice and Annie apart.

Plenty of things could since, as Vernice tells us in one of her chapters, “This was Louisiana in 1941. We were colored. Something was always wrong.”

The two are inseparable while they’re in high school but, at least partly because of the differing circumstances in their motherlessness, the women take wildly different paths.

Annie, obsessed with finding her mother, goes on a series of picaresque adventures that include becoming a washerwoman at a bordello and a relationship with a man who’s jealous of her search for her mother. Vernice goes to college, where she has a romance with her female roommate, then rebounds with marriage (to a man) who is a scion of Atlanta’s Black society. Years go by in which the two do not see each other and they face challenges, such as Vernice’s marriage into a higher social class than they grew up in, with a mother-in-law who wants her to drop Annie. But they immediately pick up again the minute they see each other.

“I don’t have what she got nor the other way around,” says Annie, the more introspective of the two. “What you have the same isn’t what binds you. Hearts grow strings because of what you know that’s the same, what happened to you that’s the same. And when what you want is the same.”

The middle section of the book gets repetitive, but the book is a pleasure to read because the writer of “An American Marriage” creates distinctive voices for the two women (both “Marriage” and “Kin” are Oprah’s Book Club selections). Vernice is more circumspect, focusing on minute details in a way that suggests she’s hiding things from herself and us, as in this contentious meal with her aunt: “I splashed pickled pepper sauce on my greens, too much. My mouth was on fire, but I didn’t soothe myself with water because I didn’t want Irene to have the satisfaction of knowing that my tongue was throbbing.”

Annie, on the other hand, has such an open heart and such easy humor that she seems to be sharing everything with everybody, including us: “An I love you that is out in the world unanswered, bedevils a space, like the ghost of a whore in Mississippi. It’s lonely, then miserable, then angry.”

Both women experience heartache in “Kin” and it’s not at all certain that they’ve made wise choices when it comes to love, but what Tayari Jones makes abundantly clear in her wise, often side-splittingly funny novel is that their love is enough, that a family is what its members say it is.

As they prepare for Vernice’s wedding, at which Annie is — of course — the maid of honor, Annie says, “If an angel came down from heaven and told me that she didn’t have but one cup of happiness, I would tell her to pour it over you.”

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Kin

By: Tayari Jones.

Publisher: Knopf, 348 ages.

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