https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2021/0217/A-mother-searches-for-the-child-she-gave-up-as-a-teen-in-The-Kindest-Lie

This was a powerful story for me. I haven’t honestly read that many books from the perspective of an African American. It was eye-opening to see the different approaches to situations that Ruth and her family would take. It truly made me think about the difficulties some races face.

I had a really hard time getting interested in this story. I tried a few different times to get hooked on the story and was unable to really feel any connection with the characters.

I am sure many people will enjoy this book, I, personally, could not get past the first sentence, which indicated that the main character left her child in a bathroom, after giving birth.

4 Stars
Thank you to Netgalley for providing me with an early copy of this book. I am using it for the Manchester Public Library's February bookmarked box, a monthly book subscription featuring new items.
I selected this book for a variety of reasons, but for one main one that is deeply personal and close to me. Our main character, Ruth, gave up a child when she was 17 years old.
I was given up for adoption when my birth mother was 17.
I connected with this book and Ruth, in a way that many other readers will not. So putting together a review for this book is challenging, because of how personal it is. I wondered who Johnson talked with to understand Ruth and this particular situation- her insight into a birth mother was spot on in so many ways. The desire to see your child, to know what they look like, to know that they are OK.
Johnson has written a book that is timely given the nature of our social climate right now. Black children are shot all the time, simply for walking outside near a park. She captures the hope we all felt, but particularly the black community felt, when Obama was elected president.
So many issues are presented here: what does it take to be a family? What does "real" family mean? What does being a mother mean? How do we give up what is most precious to us? What does it mean to be black in today's world?
I'll be thinking about this book for a long time.

Ruth is happily married, upwardly mobile and contemplating starting a family with her husband, Xavier. But there's something she hasn't told him -- if they were to have a child, it would be his first, but not Ruth's. Because when she was seventeen, she gave birth in secret, with only her grandmother and brother present, and the baby was spirited away so that Ruth's awaiting Yale scholarship would not be compromised by the need to raise a child. Before she can move forward with Xavier, Ruth realizes, she must go back -- literally and figuratively. Her journey home is at the center of this novel, taking place over a time period of about ten days during which Ruth will learn a lot more about her family than just what happened to her baby all those years ago.

I loved the idea of this story, and for much of the book, I loved its execution. the author's ability to take us to different places with lush descriptions -- from upper middle class Chicago, to working class and poor semi-rural Indiana; the way she illustrated how irrelevant race can be when people are poor, and yet how potent racism still is, even among Black and white people whose circumstances are more similar than not. And I loved that she explored how intergenerational secrets can bind us together, but at the same time, keep us far apart.

One minor deficit for me was that while I felt interest at how things would unfold, I felt very little else in terms of connectedness to the characters' emotions, with the exception of Midnight, the 11-year-old white boy who is to unexpectedly become a key part of Ruth's journey. His story of loss was, for me, more movingly and three-dimensionally portrayed than Ruth's. But at the end, while her emotional journey finds a kind of resolution, his feels in some ways incomplete, diminishing what was at first a fully-fleshed out character in some ways to a plot device, only important to get Ruth where she needed to go.

Nevertheless, an engaging and interesting read. I look forward to more from this author.

The Kindest Lie by Nancy Johnson tells the story of Ruth a black woman who was raised in poverty by her grandparents. Ruth was extremely bright. Her grandparents had plans for her future to get her out of Ganton. Ruth nearly derailed those plans by a pregnancy in her senior year of high school. Mama hid her in the house, made her give birth in the house, and took the infant boy away from Ruth. Ruth left Ganton and went on the graduate from Yale with a degree in engineering. She found a great job and married a wonderful man. But she neglected to tell him about the baby she gave up. When Xavier starts talking about a family, Ruth begins to obsess about the boy she gave away. When she finally confesses to Xavier, he is furious that she withheld the information. Ruth goes home to Ganton supposedly for Christmas but in actuality Ruth intends to try to find her son. While in Ganton, Ruth befriends the white grandchild of one of her Grandma’s friends. I can’t speak to racial inequality but I feel like this novel gets It right. Although I felt the story started slowly, it picked up and was hard to put down.

Ah, this was a GOOD one. I received the ARC e-book download from the Book Club Girl Early Read program.

Yikes! That was in OCTOBER. I have to say, my ONLY complaint about this book is that the "book-jacket" description didn't fully pull me in. Thus, why it sat on my TBR list until now.

Don't be fooled. Don't be turned off. It's an AWESOME story. Yes, it's an awesome story FIRST and then it's also a powerful, discussable, important message second. Having grown up in the far northern Chicago suburbs and finishing my college degree in Chicago, I realize what a sticky situation race is in Chicago. Chicago has a long, ugly history of race relations and I can say there's a lot of messed up things with such a beautiful city.

This week, I watched a webinar with her and Jodi Piccoult (and I am not an uber Piccoult fangirl who has read everything she wrote). Watching that and watching Johnson's humility and awe at the attention her book has created has made me a fangirl of hers!

I cannot give enough praise to Nancy Johnson for this as a superior first novel! She created characters that will stick with me for a long time to come.

The Kindest Lie is a novel about race, motherhood and family told from two perspectives, Ruth and Midnight. Ruth Tuttle is a successful engineer who returns to her hometown to find out the truth about what happened to the baby she was forced to give up when she had him as a teen. Midnight is a teenager stuck in a pretty tough situation after losing his mother. Through the novel we see their stories intertwine in a way I did not expect. While Ruth and Midnight’s characters could be unlikable at times, I think that was the point. I wasn’t a fan of how Ruth told her story to her husband Xavier and I thought the ending needed a little more clarity. But, this novel was beautifully written and the author did a great job weaving the themes together and showing us what life was like for both Ruth and Midnight.

The premise of this novel was really good, and the author is a really good writer. There are many themes touched on: racism, classism, reckoning with our past, how we tell our truth, marriage, and even the decision to have children. However, I felt like there was a lot of surface without much depth, especially in a few scenes; e.g., police violence against black people.

A black woman returns to her financially depressed hometown and reunites with her grandmother and brother. Conflicted over starting a family with her husband, she seeks answers related to her teenage pregnancy that only her original family can provide.

A parallel story involves a close friend of her grandmother’s who is white and has a grandson she is caring for. This novel weaves together race, gender, class, and generational issues.

The Kindest Lie was one of the best books I’ve read in awhile. I’m surprised it is a debut. The characters felt real and the story line is relevant. The characters were well developed but weren’t perfect. I especially liked the portrayal of the relationship between Ruth and Midnight. I would definitely recommend this book.

Ruth has it all--an Ivy League degree, a great engineering job, and a devoted husband. As they consider their future, Ruth still has not dealt with her past, including a teen pregnancy she was forced to give up for adoption in order to pursue her dreams. When problems derail her Chicago life, she returns home to the deteriorating small town that she left behind, in order to see what truth there might be to find.

The Kindest Lie was an interesting story, revolving around an African American family and what it has taken Ruth to succeed in life, along with her grandparents' sacrifices to get her there. The choices they made did work, and Ruth has become successful, but those choices came at a major cost to Ruth and her peace of mind. The only option left is to find out what really happened to her child and why her grandmother did what she did. Are the best choices then still the best choices now? And what are the tradeoffs to the choices made?

4 stars

I would probably give this 3.5 stars. There are some good things about this story, but to me, there are some things that don’t work well. I really don’t like the publisher’s summary for this book at all. It gives away half the book and hints that there is this big case that she shouldn’t solve. I feel like that’s really not what’s important about this story. To me, it’s more of a story about what makes a family and who true friends really are.

The story alternates between the point of view of Ruth, the main character and after awhile in the story, a young white boy named Midnight. She has been married for a few years and due to her own shame, doesn’t tell him, or anyone else that she had a child in high school (which you find out in the summary or in the first few chapters of the book). So she leaves to find out information about what happened to her child. I feel like the relationship with her husband is kind of odd and not well developed (for two people who genuinely love each other).

I also feel like the relationship with Midnight, while sweet, would seem really odd given the circumstances (a woman who hasn’t returned home in a dozen years, who over a period of a few weeks, develops this close relationship with an unrelated young boy).

All of that to say, I do like the relationship between Ruth and her brother, and the overall meaning of the story. It is a quick, easy read, and while somewhat blatant in what it wants to “preach”, (i.e. white boys not understanding what it is to be a black boy, your parents are the people who raise you, etc), it is a sweet story.

I read the ARC version of this book thanks to The Book Club Girls, so maybe some of these issues were resolved in the final publication.

“But Ruth refused to accept that label, knowing now that a lifetime relationship of lies never added up to anything good. A lifetime of doing the wrong things for the right reasons. A lifetime of lies that started small, like a nick in the windshield, then eventually shattered the glass.” Ch 26

“The two of them knew better than anyone the price you paid for walking away from your child because someone else decided for you what was best.” Ch 39

I thought this was a very insightful story one that could open many eyes to things they had never considered before. Was a great book one I will read again for sure

What a fascinating book. I was impressed by the storyline and the characters were all well written and complex. Where there are complex storylines combined with intriguing characters the reader experience is magnified tremendously. To have a book that is well written as well as entertaining is a delight. Reading is about escaping your world and entering another one. Here I forgot about my own life and was immersed in the world created by the author. I would recommend this book.

With topics of race, class, prejudice, motherhood and discrimination I really wanted to like this book, sadly it wasn't the case for me.

The writing felt disjointed, paragraphs that didn't connect one with the other. The first fifty pages were very confusing with lots of ideas that were hard to interconnect and with inconsequential characters that didn't bring any value to the story.

As I continued reading the book some of the plot became easy to understand, but the book didn't grab me as to eagerly continue reading to know what happens at the end of the story, I did finished the book.

As I mentioned before with the same topics present now, as in 2008 when the story takes place, sexuality, race, discrimination, class, motherhood, the book had a big potential to be a great read, unfortunately for me it felt flat.

I loved this book and every character in it!
Opening with Obama's election brining hope to the black community of Chicago, Ruth and her husband, Xavier, host an election party and spirits are high. Xavier is so thrilled with their prospects he wants to start a family with Ruth. He wants the American dream that he feels is now within their grasp. Ruth is hesitant due to a secret she has kept from her husband for years; she gave away her baby at seventeen so she could pursue her American dream of becoming an chemical engineer.
With tensions high between them, Ruth heads home to her Indiana past. There she will try to find out what happened to her baby, confront her brother and Grandmother who raised her. She will meet up with her past while contending with her present.
The possibility of tragedy grows until the reader is rushing to see how it ends.
Thank you to Netgalley for an early copy. All opinions are my own.

***Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a Kindle ARC of this book***

Warning: Unpopular opinion coming

Ruth returns home after years of being away to confront a mistake she made when she was a teenager. Upon her return she discovers her upbringing was layered with many lies that shaped her life in ways she never knew about.

I didn't love this one! I kept hearing rave reviews about this and was expecting more. There were a lot of important issues brought up here and I didn't feel like they were presented well. I wanted a deeper discussion about certain topics and I feel like anyone reading this book who doesn't have the background knowledge won't truly understand the underlying issues of race and social class. I had difficulty with Ruth's naivety in certain situations, and her marital situation felt unrealistic to me (not explaining more to avoid spoilers) This was almost 3 stars, but if I were to describe the book to someone I would probably use the exact words "it was just ok" so therefore the 2 star rating.

The Kindest Lie by Nancy Johnson
Rating 3/5 Stars
Publish Date - 2/2/2021

Thanks to Netgalley, William Marrow, and of course, Nancy Johnson, for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.


It’s 2008 and Obama is the first African American President of the United States. Ruth and her husband Xavier live in Chicago and have every reason to be excited about Obama’s victory. But Ruth holds a secret back in her hometown in Indiana - she had a child placed up for adoption.

Once home, Ruth meets Midnight - a sweet boy from a troubled family. Midnight is my favorite character within the novel. I truly enjoyed reading about him. The connection between Ruth and Midnight - that their grandmothers both raised them when their parents couldn’t (Midnight’s dying and Ruth’s leaving) elevated the novel and really made me like them and the connection.

The Kindest Lie is one of those books that makes you read and reread what you just read. It explores race, family, class, community, and the repercussions of decisions. The writing is beautiful and the meaning is even better, however, I did find a few parts that I had issues with. I found Ruth to be unlikable as a protagonist. She was selfish and abandoned her family after all of the sacrifices that were made to help her succeed. Ruth resents her grandmother for taking care of her baby’s adoption. I also found it kind of frustrating that she did not mention it to her husband.

I did find the mystery of who and where is Ruth’s baby to be a bit flimsy, I was able to figure it out pretty early on in the book. I also was kind of annoyed that Midnight’s story was not given a good resolution.

All in all, I did enjoy the book, beyond my dislikes is a novel that is truly beautiful for a debut and focuses on timely issues which are necessary for fiction. I do recommend it!