Book review: There Will Be Lies

By Nick Lake
Available from Amazon
Ages: 15–25

Reviewed by Erin (17), who is moderately deaf.

Erin

"There Will Be Lies is a book written from the perspective of a deaf teenager called Shelby who lives in Arizona. Shelby lives a sheltered life: she doesn’t go to school and her mum controls everywhere she goes. One day she gets hit by a car and a coyote tells her that there will be two lies and then the truth will be revealed, and after hearing this she goes on a journey to discover the truth and find out who she is inside.

I like this book because it’s not instantly obvious Shelby is deaf. She doesn’t mention that she’s deaf until a couple of chapters in, but there are some clues: she misses out on what people say when she isn’t facing them, she uses subtitles on the TV and the author doesn’t use speech marks but uses italics to show speech. That’s one thing I didn’t like about the book. Even though it shows that characters are signing, when Shelby and others are speaking the author keeps using italics which made the dialogue hard to follow. Apart from that it’s a really good, addictive book and I would definitely recommend it to everyone.”