REVIEWS		  
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Praise for The Year We Left Home

“Startlingly resonant...lovely...told with extraordinary grace. A–”
-- Entertainment Weekly
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"Wise and absorbing, this is one not to miss."
-- People Magazine
People Pick of the Week
3.5 out of 4 stars
“A masterful wide-angle portrait of an Iowa family over three decades...In Thompson's unforgettable, offbeat novel, an extended Iowa family struggles for emotional and economic stability over three decades, beginning with a modest Lutheran wedding in 1983 and ending with a bittersweet homecoming...Thompson has crafted a dazzling book that works both as an epic page-turner and a series of tightly focused, chronologically arranged stories...the novel is a powerful reflection on middle American life—on the changes wrought by the passing years and the values that endure.”
-- Kirkus Reviews
(Starred Review)

"Thompson’s pithy humor, redolent details, and knowing compassion have never been sharper or more resounding as her characters’ follies and struggles reveal depthless truths about men and women, families and vocations, the lure of away and the gravitational pull of home.”
-- Donna Seaman, Booklist
(starred review)

“Poignant...compelling...gut-wrenching and honest.”
-- Bookpage
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“In the same vein as Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, The Year We Left Home unpacks the quotidian stories of a family with such mindfulness and attention, the result is both devastating and perfect…She’s a hell of a writer, with descriptions…sharp and true and bizarre…Thompson’s close-to-the-ground details, in all of her fiction, are genius.”
-- Bust Magazine

“This compelling chronicle of the subtle and grand departures that constitute a life is alive with incident and told by a cast of likable characters who are as uniquely drawn as they are recognizable.”
-- More Magazine
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“In Thompson's engaging style, each character has a life filled with much humor, insight, reconciliation and understanding…Thompson pulls the reader into this novel and keeps us hoping for the best for her characters, as she chronicles events and shows us their interior lives…told in a wry, humorous authentic manner, filled with insight and beautifully nuanced.”
-- Shelf Awareness
 
 
  

The Year We Left Home

“...it's this sense of the family revivified--of knowing what's coming yet being emotionally outflanked by it anyway--that best characterizers The Year We Left Home, an extraordinarily warm-hearted novel whose impressive humanity and lightness of touch refresh some narrative elements so abundantly precedented that most fiction writers would have been afraid to go near them....By rescuing the particular from the universal in transparent prose and with sympathetic wit, Thompson takes these narrative puppets and turns them, Geppetto-like, into real boys....The Year We Left Home invites, and withstands, comparisons to Evan S. Connell's novels Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge, two...of the great American fictions of the last century.”
-- Jonathan Dee
New York Times Book Review
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"[A] smart, resonant novel..."
-- Boston Globe
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