ABOUT
THE BOOK

Sixteen-year-old Nomi Nickel longs to hang out with Lou Reed and Marianne Faithfull in New York City’s East Village. Instead she’s trapped in East Village, Manitoba, a small town whose population is Mennonite: “the most embarrassing sub-sect of people to belong to if you’re a teenager.” East Village is a town with no train and no bar whose job prospects consist of slaughtering chickens at the Happy Family Farms abattoir or churning butter for tourists at the pioneer village.

Nomi lives alone with her father, Ray, and her days are spent piecing together the reasons her warm and spirited mother, Trudie, and her beautiful and mouthy sister, Tash, have gone missing. As she gets to the bottom of the truth about their disappearances, she finds herself on a direct collision course with her uncle, The Mouth, and the only community she has ever known.

In a voice both defiant and vulnerable, Nomi offers hilarious and heartbreaking reflections on life, death, family, faith and love. And even when one more loss is heaped on her piles of losses, she maintains hope and finds the imagination and willingness to envision what lies beyond.