Lies You Wanted to Hear (Thomson)

Book Reviews
Quite an achievement ... confident and eminently readable
New York Journal of Books

A spellbinding stunner of a debut ... Lies You Wanted to Hear is a novel of intensely lifelike characters and chilling choices and consequences that is utterly satisfying from start to finish.
Redbook Magazine

A remarkable, readable novel that's sure to provoke animated debate
Portland Daily Sun


[A] divorced father... kidnaps his two young children from their mother, whom he perceives to be unfit to raise them.... Matt assigns them new identities and lies to his kids about their mother before they take up a fugitive lifestyle. As time passes, the reader’s sympathies align more with Lucy, who is left heartsick over the loss of her kids, in Thomson’s well-told narrative of complex characters and their troubled families.
Publishers Weekly


Matt...falls into paranoia, convincing himself that [his wife] Lucy is a danger to her children and that he must take drastic actions to save them.... Lucy and Matt share with the reader the truths they never told each other. Verdict: This first novel...slowly builds momentum, ending with a satisfying twist on the theme of why good love can go bad and what redemption can cost. —Jan Blodgett, Davidson Coll. Lib., NC
Library Journal


[An] effective debut.... Thomson lays out the moral complexities underlying acrimonious divorces, taking care to make each side credible.
Booklist


First-time novelist Thomson explores the excruciating pain of a marriage gone wrong in this dreary tale stretched out over two decades.... Thomson writes in clear if pedestrian prose, shifting between Lucy and Matt, but unfortunately, the novel never transcends the dour particulars of its own he said, she said storytelling.... Relentlessly grim melodrama, in the vein of Ordinary People and Kramer vs. Kramer.
Kirkus Reviews