Named a Most Anticipated book by O Magazine * GMA * Elle * Marie Claire * Good Housekeeping * NBC News * Shondaland * Chicago Tribune * Woman’s Day * Refinery 29 * Bustle * The Millions * New York Post * Parade * Hello! Magazine * PopSugar * and more!“The Kindest Lie is a deep dive into how we define family, what it means to be a mother, and what it means to grow up Black…beautifully crafted.” … deep dive into how we define family, what it means to be a mother, and what it means to grow up Black…beautifully crafted.” —JODI PICOULT
“A fantastic story…well-written, timely, and oh-so-memorable.”—Good Morning America
“The Kindest Lie is a layered, complex exploration of race and class.” —The Washington Post
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.
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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Race, class, family, and secrets are all on a collision course in Johnson’s extraordinarily moving, timely read. Like a heat-seeking missile, her novel hones in on who we think we belong to and why, following the merging lives of Ruth, a black female engineer who seeks out the child she gave away, and Midnight, a young white boy struggling to find his place in the very poverty Ruth managed to escape. A gloriously written, stunning heart scorcher about who we are and what we could be.
The Kindest Lie is the story of one family that reveals the larger story of America itself. Taut and surprising, Nancy Johnson’s debut novel tackles complex issues — ambition, romance, class — with the lightest of touches.
In The Kindest Lie Nancy Johnson takes us both into a bygone time, the dawning of the Obama era, and into the tender heart of her protagonist Ruth. This is a novel that seeks to discover the beauty of our journeys despite the lies we tell each other and ourselves.
A heart-wrenching portrayal of an unlikely bond, and a profound nod to the fallacy of post-racial America — The Kindest Lie is nuanced, spellbinding, and necessary.
In this winning portrait of circumstance, sacrifice, and forgiveness, the lines that separate past from present and right from wrong are erased and redrawn — oftentimes with earth-shattering consequences. Rife with rich language, shocking revelations, and easy-to-fall-into characters, The Kindest Lie is the kind of novel you’ll feel in your bones.
The Kindest Lie is not only a superb debut novel, it is without qualification a superb novel. Nancy Johnson endows her characters with a generous grace that slowly embraces the reader as the plot unfolds, accomplishing what the very best novels do — tell the stories of strangers so well we are ultimately compelled to discover the strangers within us all.
Didn’t interest me!
Ruth is a highly educated Black woman. She has kept a secret from her husband, Xavier, for the last 10yrs. She won’t introduce him to any of her family or take him to her hometown. It’s not til her husband starts talking about having kids, that her secret finally comes out. Ruth meets Midnight when she visits her hometown, alone, during Christmas. Family secrets come out when Ruth goes home. I like this book, i like hearing all the secrets must be the nosey in me. Nancy Johnson hit a home run with this book.
This book was so well done. I couldn’t put it down. Highly recommend.
The Kindest Lie by Nancy Johnson is the story of the past and a lie told to protect interferes with the present. The story opens on Election Night 2008 and Barack Obama has just been elected the new president of the United States, As his coming inauguration brings the promise of new hope for the future, Ruth Tuttle Shaw, an Ivy-League Black engineer, seemingly has it all, a successful career, a kind and successful husband, Xavier. Xavier is eager to start a family but Ruth is uncertain. She has never forgotten the baby she gave birth to at 17. She was forced to leave him behind to attend college. She promised her grandmother, the woman who raised her and she called Mama, that she would never look back. Ruth realizes that to move forward, she must make peace with the past. She returns home to the Indiana factory town where she finds the town plagued by unemployment, racism and despair. As she begins her search into the past, she befriends a young boy, Patrick aka “Midnight.” Midnight is a young white boy who desperately wants a place to belong. As Ruth begins to follow the clues to uncover the secrets surrounding her baby boy, secrets her family is desperate to leave in the past, an incident occurs which adds fuel to the town’s racial tensions. Can Ruth discover the truth? Will the truth upend the lives of all involved?
The Kindest Lie is a powerful and revealing look into the divide between Black and White communities. Even with the election of the first Black president, many Black residents of the town were skeptical that things would change. The book is also an unwavering look of motherhood in contemporary America and the search for the American Dream. Ruth is a woman who is caught between two worlds. She doesn’t seem to belong among those she grew up with in the small town but she also seems lost in the world of the big city. As she digs into the past, she discovers more about her grandparents, her absent mother and the desire for her to become more than just a statistic in their small town. It is a story of the complicated and messy aspects of love. It is a story of how small lies can grow into bigger lies, “a lifetime of doing wrong for the right reasons. A lifetime of lies that started small, like a nick in the windshield, then eventually shattered the glass.” It is a story of the realization that there are no perfect mothers, just perfectly flawed ones who do what they can in the moment and pray it all works out. I highly recommend The Kindest Lie. It is a powerful, heartbreaking look into the lives of Americans. Black, white, poor, successful and everyone in between, we are all searching for the same things: a place to belong, a family to love and a better future than the struggles of the past.
The Kindest Lie is available in hardcover, paperback, eBook and audiobook.
Johnson covers so many hot topics in a wonderful story – race, class, upward mobility, privilege. Her absorbing story with realistic characters you’ll love, even with all their flaws, kept me glued to the page. A fabulous debut. I’m sure we’ll be hearing more from Nancy Johnson.
This is a powerful book about love, loss, looking forward, looking back, race, privilege, education, and choices. Nancy Johnson has packed a lot into this debut novel.
Ruth is a successful black chemical engineer married to a successful man. Her success didn’t come easily. When she was 17, she had a child, and her grandmother gave the baby away, saying that this child could not get in the way of Ruth’s Ivy League education. Ruth has never told her husband, Xavier, about her son. Now married four years, and on the verge of the first Obama presidency, Xavier is anxious to start their family.
Ruth realizes that she must confess this secret to Xavier in order to move forward. Ruth must leave Chicago’s South Side and return to her roots in Indiana to try to find her son.
While in Indiana, Ruth meets Midnight (Patrick), a young white boy who acts like he is black. She knows that both he and Ruth are searching for love.
Ruth confronts her grandmother, her brother, and her friends until she finds the truth about her son, which helps her find the answers she craves.
The novel explores the differences in race and privilege, and the choices we make. Outstanding and thought provoking novel.
Thanks to Harper Collins, The Book Club Girls, Edelweiss.plus and NetGalley for a copy of this ARC. All opinions are my own, and are given freely.
#TheKindestLie #HarperCollins #TheBookClubGirls #Edelweiss #NetGalley.
Stunning women’s fiction. A perfect book club pick.
I’ve been anticipating Nancy Johnson’s debut for a long time, and it did not disappoint.
The book opens in Chicago, where Ruth and her husband are celebrating election night 2008. In the days that follow, discussions about starting a family resurrect a secret Ruth has withheld from her husband their whole relationship. When she shares it, it doesn’t go well, and she ends up returning—without her husband—to her small-town Indiana home to try to seek out the child she gave up for adoption as a teenager.
For me, it was when she reached her home town that Ruth’s story really began to sing. Throughout the Chicago sequence, I had the sense that Ruth felt she didn’t quite belong, despite having achieved everything she and her family ever wanted for her. When she goes home, she’s facing conflict on every side—but you can sense that she’s doing the hard work of digging down to the essence and finding—and more importantly, reconciling with—her past self.
As a white woman, it’s hard for me to offer any commentary on the interracial themes Johnson addresses. Much of the story is universal. The parts that are not are so far outside my experience; I am simply grateful for the engaging story that lets me see things I wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity to see. She does a masterful job breaking stereotypes and showing the push and pull between characters white and Black, uneducated and highly educated and aspiring to be educated, and showing that when stuff hits the fan, nobody walks away unscathed. We are all in this together. You couldn’t find a better lesson for our time.
2008, Obama was elected president of the USA. Ruth Tuttle, A prosperous black engineer, is married to an equally successful black man.
Life is good for Ruth until one day her husband starts pressuring her to have kids. Little does he know that his wife had given birth to a boy in 1997 at 17 and gave him to adoption. Tired of hiding such a secret, she ends up confessing to her husband and goes back to her hometown in an attempt to make amends with her turbulent past.
Upon arriving in her town, she befriends a white, 12-year-old Patrick, who goes by the nickname Midnight, a kid who feels out of place and secretly wishes he was black.
As she starts her search, she realizes that some secrets should not be unearthed.
Racial conflicts, emotional struggles, and an attempt at redemption lie at the core of this beautifully written story with a realistic ending.
This is a well-written, suspenseful, deeply nuanced look at how the struggles of poverty play out across race and time in two families, Black and White. Black Yale grad Ruth’s successful middle-class life in Chicago is threatened when her husband’s desire for a child forces her to reveal that she already had one years ago, at seventeen, and gave up the child (though she didn’t necessarily have much choice in the matter). Now she goes home to a Rust Belt town in Indiana determined to find out what happened to her son, but nobody in her family wants to help her do it. Then there’s Midnight, the young White kid of an unemployed son of a family friend. Midnight is starving for love and attention and pins his hopes on kind Ruth, but — like his Dad — he’s not beyond some pretty monstrous moves when things don’t go his way. The tension builds quickly towards a conflict that could easily become deadly.
Johnson doesn’t shy away from complexity: Nobody is perfectly innocent in this story, on either side of the racial divide, but they’re often doing the best they can, even if that involves lying. It’s a rewarding and thought-provoking read. Highly recommended!
I was intrigued by The Kindest Lie by Nancy Johnson the moment I read its title and saw the cover. It’s a complex, well-written contemporary novel that raises more questions than it answers.
A former journalist, I’ve heard Ms. Johnson’s work described as focused on the intersection of race and class in the US, and that describes this thought-provoking novel so well.
Main character Ruth, a young urban professional in Chicago, is caught between the euphoria of Barack Obama’s election as President and pressure from her husband to start their family. Serious talk of having a baby raises long-buried emotions and leads Ruth to celebrate Christmas in her hometown, a small Indiana city devastated when the primary employer closes its factory. Ruth reconnects with her brother, the grandmother who raised her, and childhood friends while also meeting people who will cause her to do things she didn’t think were possible.
In some literary serendipity, I read The Kindest Lie immediately after ‘Til I Want No More by Robin W. Pearson. Both were written by talented Black women early in their writing careers, each features a young professional who gave birth at age 17 but didn’t raise their child to attend prestigious universities, and both novels were published on 02/02/2021. Despite these similarities, these are very different stories, but I’d be first in line for a conversation involving both of these authors.