‘Half of our family, the better-looking half, is missing,’ Naomi tells us at the beginning of A Complicated Kindness. Left alone with her father Ray, her days are spent piecing together the reasons her mother Trudie and her sister Tash have gone missing, and trying to figure out what she can do to avoid a career at Happy Family Farms, a chicken abattoir on the outskirts of East Village - not the neighbourhood in Manhattan where Naomi most wants to live but the small town in southern Manitoba. East Village is ministered by Hans, Naomi’s pious uncle, otherwise known as The Mouth.
As Naomi gets to the bottom of the truth behind her mother’s and sister’s disappearances, she finds herself on a direct collision course with her uncle and the only community she has ever known.
