Description

Within this spectacular coming-of-age book, prize-champion Miriam Toews amounts suffering and desire in the voice of a witty, beleaguered teenager whose family is broken by fundamentalist Christianity "Half of our family, the greater-looking half, is missing," Nomi Nickel tells us at the start of An Elaborate 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 Nyc where Nomi would rather to reside, but an oppressive town founded by Mennonites on the cold, flat plains of Manitoba, Canada. This darkly funny novel may be the world based on the memorable Nomi, a bewildered and wry sixteen-year-old trapped in a town governed by fundamentalist religion and inside the broken remains of the household it ruined.