The Kindest Lie: when moving forward means confronting the past

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.