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Your Grandpa is a felon and a Christian. He says he's a felon because he's a Christian.
So says Aunt Sweet to her nephew Dustin, when her father, who has been raising Dustin, is arrested for hiding migrant workers. The law that makes harbouring 'illegals' an offence is the brainchild of the ferociously ambitious Oklahoma politician Monica Moorehouse.
Aunt Sweet takes Dustin in, but Dustin is bullied by her son, and so goes on the run, aided by an illegal the sheriffs didn't find. Meanwhile, Sweet is asked by Dustin's married sister to hide her husband, a Mexican without papers. As Grandpa Brown holds fast to his beliefs and Dustin remains missing, Aunt Sweet fights to hold the family together, and to do what seems right.
In a gripping and compelling narrative, Kind of Kin lays bare the consequences of a law that exiles workers, turns friends into informers, and tears apart families. It also shows how some - and ultimately a whole town - will unite to protect their own.
About the author
Rilla Askew has written three literary novels previously for which she received a 2009 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dublin IMPAC Prize, and twice received the Oklahoma Book Award. Askew divides her time between upstate New York and Oklahoma.
Summary
A compelling, funny and poignant novel about what happens when a family - and an entire community - are forced to confront the difference between right and wrong.
Foreword
A compelling, funny and poignant novel about what happens when a family - and an entire community - are forced to confront the difference between right and wrong.
Report
This story has a furious pulse... Askew paces her story masterfully. The reader turns the pages with a mounting sense of anticipation and dread... Explores with a deft hand and an unflinching moral vision the gray areas of an argument so often presented in black and white. New York Times Book Review
