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Loading... A Complicated Kindness: A Novel (original 2004; edition 2005)by Miriam Toews
Work InformationA Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews (2004)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Beautifully written. Though not YA, it would be great reading for 14 teens. Adults will recognize elements of their teenhood in the sharp observations of the protagonist. ( ) I was so impressed with the start of this book because it was so comical with exactly the type of sarcastic humour that I enjoy. However, it did go on too long and for no reason that I can discern. Her trips to Abe Hill and The Comb's trailer kept repeating themselves. I did feel for Nomi but got tired of the wanderings with no point. Toews seminal text holds up. Nomi's angst, questions, and profound grief are rendered in a way that captures the spirit of adolescence without being dated or awkward. I did wish for a bit more explication of her mother's turn away from her father as that seemed to hang in the background and came to the surface rather abruptly. Overall I am reminded why she's one of my favorite authors and really the joy, wonder, and sorrow of living.
Those of us who felt oppressed as teenagers can easily recall how any act of rule-bending, whether it was puffing a cigarette or starting an ill-advised romance, could seem an enormous yet thrilling risk of outsized proportions. [Toews] has produced a work of fiction that resounds with truth.... That is at once a profoundly funny book, and a profoundly sad one, which will often leave readers wondering if they should laugh or cry. Unforgettable. Exquisitely written and faceted.... Heartbreaking and humorous... From beginning to end the book is unusually calibrated and incredibly compelling. A darkly funny and provocative novel. Belongs to Publisher SeriesFabula [Adelphi] (168) Has as a reference guide/companionAwardsNotable Lists
In this stunning coming-of-age novel, award-winner Miriam Toews balances grief and hope in the voice of a witty, beleaguered teenager whose family is shattered by fundamentalist Christianity "Half of our family, the better-looking half, is missing," Nomi Nickel tells us at the beginning of A Complicated Kindness. Left alone with her sad, peculiar father, her days are spent piecing together why her mother and sister have disappeared and contemplating her inevitable career at Happy Family Farms, a chicken slaughterhouse on the outskirts of East Village. Not the East Village in New York City where Nomi would prefer to live, but an oppressive town founded by Mennonites on the cold, flat plains of Manitoba, Canada. This darkly funny novel is the world according to the unforgettable Nomi, a bewildered and wry sixteen-year-old trapped in a town governed by fundamentalist religion and in the shattered remains of a family it destroyed. In Nomi's droll, refreshing voice, we're told the story of an eccentric, loving family that falls apart as each member lands on a collision course with the only community any of them have ever known. A work of fierce humor and tragedy by a writer who has taken the American market by storm, this searing, tender, comic testament to family love will break your heart. No library descriptions found. |
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