Tash eventually runs away from home with her boyfriend Ian, and Nomi dreams of moving to the real East Village (in New York) and hanging out with Lou Reed. But that doesn’t keep Nomi or her sister Tash from throwing themselves into the usual adolescent cauldron of hormones, scorn, and rebellion. East Village has a movie theater but no bars, discos, pool halls, McDonald’s, or Starbucks-and even the theater specializes in films about Menno Simons (who founded the religion and named it after himself). Her hometown of East Village, Manitoba, you see, is populated almost entirely by Mennonites, an austere Christian sect. (Oct.An amusing if somewhat rambling account by Canadian author Toews ( Swing Low: A Life, 2001) of a teenaged girl growing up in the middle of nowhere.Īll adolescents think they live in the dorkiest place in the world, but 16-year-old Nomi Nickle maybe really does. Bold, tender and intelligent, this is a clear-eyed exploration of belief and belonging, and the irresistible urge to escape both. Though the narration occasionally unravels into distracting stream of consciousness, the unsentimental prose and the poignant character interactions sustain reader interest. Still, she and Ray are linked in a tender, if fragile, partnership as each slips into despair. Her gentle, uncommunicative father, Ray, isn't much of a sounding board as Nomi plunges into bittersweet memory and grapples with teenage life in a 'kind of a cult with pretend connections to some normal earthly conventions.' Once a 'curious, hopeful child' Nomi now relies on biting humor as her life spins out of control-she stops attending school, shaves her head and wanders around in a marijuana-induced haze-while Ray sells off most of their furniture, escapes on all-night drives and increasingly withdraws into himself. In bleak rural Manitoba, Nomi longs for her older sister, Tash ('she was so earmarked for damnation it wasn't even funny'), and mother, Trudie, each of whom has recently fled fundamentalist Christianity and their town. A 16-year-old rebels against the conventions of her strict Mennonite community and tries to come to terms with the collapse of her family in this insightful, irreverent coming-of-age novel.

A complicated kindness book review