A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews was Medicine Hat’s second One Book One Community book selection. This novel about a young girl’s coming of age in a small Mennonite town in Manitoba won numerous awards including the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction.
Reader’s Guide to A Complicated Kindness
A Message from Miriam Toews
Greetings to all OBOC participants!
I’m thrilled and honoured to have had my novel, A Complicated Kindness, chosen as the focus of this year’s One Book One Community event. I regret not being able to attend in person, but I hope my work generates some interesting discussions. Over the last year and a half I’ve been fortunate enough to talk with readers from around the world, and I’ve found that communities like my fictional East Village exist in one form or another across the globe, not necessarily defined by religious or cultural demarcations – but by an unfortunately wide reaching and deeply ingrained intolerance and fear. I know that you’ll find Patrick Friesen – who wrote a brilliant play called The Shunning – deeply insightful about the concepts of closed communities and the struggles of those who dare to either challenge the status quo or to leave altogether. Having said that, however, I’d also like to point out that my novel, although it is critical of religious fundamentalism, was never meant to be an indictment of the Mennonite faith, or of the Mennonite people. And I’d also like to add that there are many, many truly loving and forgiving Mennonite churches that exist in the world, and hopefully there will be more and more.
I hope you all have some fun with the book and that you all enjoy the event!
Sincerely,
Miriam Toews
