A review by readingwithlexie
The Kindest Lie by Nancy Johnson

4.0

The Kindest Lie was a good book. This book really makes you think a reevaluate the way that you look at your life now and they choices/mistakes you made in the past. We follow a young black woman in Chicago at the time when Obama became president of the United States. She is going to start a family with her husband but before she can do that she is forced to come to terms with things from her past. She had a baby at seventeen and that baby was given up, but she has no details and cannot stop thinking of this baby. She is drawn home to find information and in the process finds more than she wants and makes a new friend in a little boy who is struggling in his own ways. Throughout the book we learn what secrets the town and the people living in it is hiding. We learned what happened to her child who is now eleven. We learn what life Midnight (the young boy) has lived and how things change for him. The biggest thing we learn though is that you cannot live in the past. Everything that has happened and every choice that you have made in your life has brought you to where you are today. You cannot take them back and you cannot change them. The best way to live is to move forward and try to change for the better. Living in the past will only bring you down. I loved the lessons this book provides because we all know we have those things that we regret but watching these characters move on and grow shows us that we can too. We can become better people and make our futures what we want, we just have to work hard and sometimes make those hard choices.