Faber & Faber

This month's featured reading group - the Briar Book Club - recently reviewed Miriam Toews's A Complicated Kindness (download our guide to find out more). Here's what they thought.

Is A Complicated Kindness a book that we as a book club would have typically chosen?

When selecting a book we might have been forgiven for not being drawn to a book based on the bleak experience of teenage angst as a young girl struggles to understand her dysfunctional family as it disintegrates within a highly repressed and repressive isolated religious community. We may have been put off by the cover with imagery suggesting sexual abuse of a young girl. If we had picked it up to read it, we might not have been engaged with the opening pages that dwell on slaughter, and describes a community which shuns all earthly pleasures and waits for death. However if we had decided not to read it, we would have missed a thought-provoking experience.

One of the challenges and pleasures of a book club is that you do not always go for the easy read. It is an opportunity to read books that you would not otherwise read. In the case of A Complicated Kindness it is definitely worth persevering.

This is an exceptional book, which has a richness of content with striking insights and considerable humour. The main character, Nomi, shows intelligence, kind heartedness and resourcefulness. Although she loses everyone who is dear to her including her family, close friend and boyfriend, as well as being excommunicated by her community, there is a sense of hope throughout the book.

She adapts as the family house that she shares with her father falls into disrepair and whose contents are gradually removed, continuing to look after her father and cook him what she calls alphabet meals.

She rebels in a number of ways such as avoiding church and school, taking drugs, self harming, and shaving her head.

She describes her physical and mental pain as she tries to come to terms with her mother and sister leaving the family home. The extent of her disturbed behaviour is illustrated through her imaginary friend, created not for company and comfort, but as someone hating her and wanting to kill her.

However, despite the seemingly gloomy content, this is an intriguing and surprisingly enjoyable book. Not every reader will like the style of writing which emulates a teenager’s conversational style in short sentences, but through this technique the author enables Nomi exposes many contradictions in the life she is leading within the Mennonite community, particularly of life and death, modernity and tradition, family and community.

Nomi says early in the book that she is not good at endings. This is illustrated throughout this account in many ways, from her inability to complete an assignment to the way that this story unfolds and is unresolved for many of the characters.

Whilst this book describes an extreme experience of a rite of passage in exceptional circumstances within an isolated and at times hostile community, it will have many resonances for teenagers coming of age. This book should give hope to parents of rebelling teenagers that under all that angst they are intelligent and self regulatory even if it is difficult to recognise.

The book is funny, deceptively clever, and deserves to be read. This book certainly provoked very different reactions from us as a group and provided plenty of material for discussion. If you are looking for a choice for a book club, this one should be on your list.

Download: A Complicated Kindness reading guide