Nancy Johnson's debut novel, The Kindest Lie, explores questions of race, motherhood, place and identity as one woman goes back to her hometown to find the child she gave birth to as a teenager.
From the outside, Ruth Tuttle's future seems full of promise. She has an Ivy League education and, despite the challenges of working in STEM as a Black woman, is pushing for a promotion at work. She is married to a successful PepsiCo marketing executive, a gentle and kind man who wants to start a family. Barack Obama has just been elected president. Inside, however, Ruth is consumed by her past. She has told herself for years that "her life began when she drove away from that little shotgun house in Indiana without her baby," a child she has never met nor mentioned since the day of his birth.
It feels inevitable that Ruth ends up back at the little Indiana house where she was raised by her grandmother, in search of answers for and about herself: What happened to her son? What does a mother owe her child? Is it ever acceptable to do something bad for the right reasons? Can we ever truly escape our pasts?
Johnson never asks these questions outright, but they lurk on every page of The Kindest Lie as Ruth revisits the failing industrial town that launched her into the world, peppered with flawed characters both unmoored by the harsh realities they face each day and anchored by those who hold them close, despite their flaws. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm