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Book Reviewed by:Powerful and revealing, The Kindest Lie captures the heartbreaking divide between Black and white communities and offers both an unflinching view of motherhood in contemporary America and the never-ending quest to achieve the American Dream.
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A promise could betray you.
It's 2008, and the inauguration of President Barack Obama ushers in a new kind of hope. In Chicago, Ruth Tuttle, an Ivy-League educated Black engineer, is married to a kind and successful man. He's eager to start a family, but Ruth is uncertain. She has never gotten over the baby she gave birth to—and was forced to leave behind—when she was a teenager. She had promised her family she'd never look back, but Ruth knows that to move forward, she must make peace with the past.
Returning home, Ruth discovers the Indiana factory town of her youth is plagued by unemployment, racism, and despair. As she begins digging into the past, she unexpectedly befriends Midnight, a young white boy who is also adrift and looking for connection. Just as Ruth is about to uncover a burning secret her family desperately wants to keep hidden, a traumatic incident strains the town's already searing racial tensions, sending Ruth and Midnight on a collision course that could upend both their lives.
Part of what is so captivating about The Kindest Lie is that Johnson nestles white grievances — "Black people are taking over everything" — next to black trauma. James Baldwin once said, "The imagination of a novelist has everything to do with what happens to his material." In The Kindest Lie, Johnson imagines black shame. Conscious of that shame, she builds Ruth's story with gentleness. She stacks like a sandcastle all the parts of the character, so by the end we are just as attached as Ruth is to her lost baby, her marriage, her career ambivalence, her love for her grandmother and brother...continued
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(Reviewed by Valerie Morales).
Years ago, comedian Chris Rock told a joke: "All my black friends have a bunch of white friends and all my white friends have one black friend." It is one of those bits of humor where the laughter leaves you reflecting on a sadder truth. Particularly, that racial segregation is still normalized in white communities. To have more than one black friend is an anomaly.
As Nancy Johnson shows in her novel The Kindest Lie, interracial friendships are contextually complicated. People of different races talk about race differently. According to Pew Research data, 63% of blacks and 66% of Asians say that race or race relations come up in conversations with family and friends. 50% of whites and 49% of Hispanics say the same. But 27% of blacks say ...
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If you liked The Kindest Lie, try these:
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Yaa Gyasi's stunning follow-up to her acclaimed national bestseller Homegoing is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama.
Gabriel Bump, author of Everywhere You Don't Belong
In The Kindest Lie, Nancy Johnson gives us two unforgettable characters. Ruth and Midnight represent different Americas: one trending up, one spiraling down. Johnson—through graceful sentences, tenderness, dramatic expertise, and overflowing empathy—is able to twist these Americas into a singular portrait of a country in transition. This enviable debut enlightens while breaking your heart. A truly beautiful achievement.
