Sixteen-year-old Nomi Nickel longs to hang out with Lou Reed and Marianne Faithfull in New York City’s East Village. Instead she’s trapped in East Village, Manitoba, a small town whose population is Mennonite: “the most embarrassing sub-sect of people to belong to if you’re a teenager.” East Village is a town with no train and no bar whose job prospects consist of slaughtering chickens at the Happy Family Farms abattoir or churning butter for tourists at the pioneer village. Ministered with an iron fist by Nomi’s uncle Hans, a.k.a. The Mouth of Darkness, East Village is a town that’s tall on rules and short on fun: no dancing, drinking, rock ’n’ roll, recreational sex, swimming, make-up, jewellery, playing pool, going to cities or staying up past nine o’clock. Living with her father, Ray, a sweet yet hapless schoolteacher whose love is unconditional but whose parenting skills amount to benign neglect, Nomi struggles to cope with the back-to-back departures three years earlier of Tash, her beautiful and mouthy sister, and Trudie, her warm and spirited mother. Father and daughter deal with their losses in very different ways. Ray, a committed elder of the church, seeks to create an artificial sense of order by reorganizing the city dump late at night. Nomi, on the other hand, favours chaos as she tries to blunt her pain through “drugs and imagination.” Together they live in a limbo of unanswered questions. Nomi goes through the motions of finishing high school while flagrantly rebelling against Mennonite tradition. She hangs out on Suicide Hill, hooks up with a boy named Travis, goes on the Pill, wanders around town, skips class and cranks Led Zeppelin. But the past is never far from her mind as she remembers happy times with her mother and sister — as well as the painful events that led them to flee town. Throughout, in a voice both defiant and vulnerable, she offers hilarious and heartbreaking reflections on life, death, family, faith and love. Eventually Nomi’s grief — and a growing sense of hypocrisy — cause her to spiral ever downward to a climax that seems at once startling and inevitable. But even when one more loss is heaped on her piles of losses, Nomi maintains hope and finds the imagination and willingness to envision what lies beyond.
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"Toews' coming-of-age novel about a teen girl struggling with her faith in an oppressive Mennonite community is at once funny and heart-breaking. Nomi Nichols is a girl who rebels at every point, dreaming of escaping her small town and the control of the Mouth - her uncle and head of the church. It would be easy to dismiss Nomi as just a kid hell-bent on breaking every rule and ruining her life with drugs and sex and truancy. But when Nomi's sister and mother both flee the town and the church, Nomi is the only one left to hold together the broken pieces of her father's life. She is both bitter and poignant in her dealings with faith, and Toews writes in a way that grabs the heart. The more control the church takes, the more her family spins out of control, and the entire book might easily be summed up in Nomi's words: "I think now I'd call it grief. It's hard to grieve in a town where everything that happens is God's will. It's hard to know what to do with your emptiness when you're not supposed to have emptiness." There are no easy endings to this story, but what Toews leaves Nomi - and her readers - with is hope. Small and fragile and impossibly difficult, but hope nonetheless."
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Heidi (4 out of 5 stars)