A Complicated Kindness

Award-winner Miriam Toews skillfully strikes a balance between optimism and loss in this breathtaking coming-of-age story told through the narrative of a funny, troubled adolescent whose family is destroyed by fundamentalist Christianity.

In the first scene of A Complicated Kindness, Nomi Nickel informs us that "half of our family, the better-looking half, is missing." Her days are spent piecing together why her mother and sister have vanished and thinking forward to her future employment at Happy Family Farms, a chicken slaughterhouse on the outskirts of East Village. She is left alone with her sad, eccentric father. Not the East Village in New York City, where Nomi would much rather be living, but a harsh hamlet established on the chilly plains of Manitoba, Canada by Mennonites.

The world of the memorable sixteen-year-old Nomi, who is stuck in a town run by fundamentalist religion and in the broken remnants of a family it ruined, is revealed in this darkly humorous tale. The narrative of a quirky, loving family that disintegrates as each member heads straight for conflict with the only community any of them have ever known is recounted in Nomi's lighthearted, invigorating style. This scorching, poignant, humorous monument to family love is a work of tremendous comedy and sorrow from a writer who has taken the American market by storm. It will make you cry.