A Complicated Kindness - Miriam Toews

Sixteen-year-old Nomi Nickel longs to hang out with Lou Reed and Marianne Faithfull
in New York City's East Village. Instead she's trapped in East Village, Manitoba,
a small town whose population is Mennonite: "the most embarrassing sub-sect of people
to belong to if you're a teenager." East Village is a town with no train and no bar
whose job prospects consist of slaughtering chickens at the Happy Family Farms abattoir
or churning butter for tourists at the pioneer village. Ministered with an iron fist
by Nomi's uncle Hans, a.k.a. The Mouth of Darkness, East Village is a town that's
tall on rules and short on fun: no dancing, drinking, rock 'n' roll, recreational
sex, swimming, make-up, jewellery, playing pool, going to cities or staying up past
nine o'clock.

Living with her father, Ray, a sweet yet hapless schoolteacher whose love is unconditional but whose parenting skills amount to benign neglect, Nomi struggles to cope with the back-to-back
departures three years earlier of Tash, her beautiful and mouthy sister, and Trudie,
her warm and spirited mother. Father and daughter deal with their losses in very different ways. Ray,
a committed elder of the church, seeks to create an artificial sense of order by
reorganizing the city dump late at night. Nomi, on the other hand, favours chaos
as she tries to blunt her pain through "drugs and imagination."
Together they live
in a limbo of unanswered questions.

Nomi goes through the motions
of finishing high school while flagrantly rebelling against Mennonite tradition.
She hangs out on Suicide Hill, hooks up with a boy named Travis, goes on the Pill,
wanders around town, skips class and cranks Led Zeppelin. But the past is never far
from her mind as she remembers happy times with her mother and sister - as well as
the painful events that led them to flee town. Throughout, in a voice both defiant
and vulnerable, she offers hilarious and heartbreaking reflections on life, death,
family, faith and love.

Eventually Nomi's grief - and a growing sense of hypocrisy
- cause her to spiral ever downward to a climax that seems at once startling and
inevitable. But even when one more loss is heaped on her piles of losses, Nomi maintains
hope and finds the imagination and willingness to envision what lies beyond.