Just Jennifer

Kind of Kin by Rilla Askew (Ecco, January 2013)

A law has just been passed in Oklahoma making harboring an undocumented illegal immigrant a felony.  The small town of Cedar is shocked when Robert John Brown, a life-long community member and churchgoer, is arrested for hiding a barn full of immigrants.  The events that follows shakes the town, the state and rocks Brown’s family to their very core.  Brown has been raising his ten-year old grandson Dustin since Dustin’s mother died and Dustin must now go and live with his aunt Sweet and her son Carl Albert.  Sweet finds herself coming apart as she worries about her father in jail, her son who is fighting with, and injuring, Dustin any chance he gets, and the usual worries about money and her husband Terry who works long hours for a utility company.  She is almost at her wits end when her niece, Dustin’s sister, Misty Dawn shows up on her doorstep with her three-year-old daughter and the husband who had recently been deported seeking refuge and Dustin goes missing, trying to help the one immigrant who wasn't caught in the raid on his grandfather’s barn be reunited with his sons.  Sweet’s story is punctuated by the story of an ambitious legislator, Monica Moorehouse, the author of the bill that set these events in motion.  Rilla Askew’s novel reminds us that while we are not all kin, we are all akin and all must live in this world together.  She faces several difficult and emotional issues, gives her characters choices that people do not have to make every day and never once passes judgment on their decisions, but holds nothing back in revealing what these decisions have wrought.  A community comes together as a family comes apart and the question “for whose good is this being done” is asked time and time again.  A wonderfully nuanced story with characters that won’t soon be forgotten.