A Complicated Kindness

Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness (2004) is about Nomi Nickel, an adolescent living in the religious Mennonite town of East Village whose coming of age takes place against the backdrop of her family’s unraveling. Toews, who grew up in the Mennonite community of Steinbach, Manitoba, is the author of several novels set in Mennonite communities, many of which are critical of aspects of the faith. This novel, Toews’s third, has garnered considerable acclaim and many awards, including the CBA Libris Fiction Award, the Governor General’s Award for English Fiction, and CBC’s Canada Reads. This study guide uses the Counterpoint Press paperback edition.

Plot Summary

The novel takes place in the late 1960s and traces the final days before the high school graduation of Nomi Nickel, a 16-year-old from East Village, Manitoba. Nomi lives with her devout, stoic father Ray, to whom she is fiercely loyal after the sudden departures of her sister Tash and her mother Trudie several weeks apart when Nomi was 13. She expects that after graduation, she will go to work at the chicken processing plant, a future that is a far cry from the life she wants: living in the other East Village in New York City and hanging out with Lou Reed.