Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson ~ a Review

by Susan Roberts

An unexpected road trip across America brings a family together in this raucous and moving new novel

Amazon affiliate links are used on this site.  A free book was provided for an honest review.

May 2025; Ecco; 978-0063317512
audio, ebook, print (256 pages); family fiction

This delightful book is full of quirky characters who find out they are related.  As you meet this family who never knew about each other, you realize that this family is dysfunctional to the max.  Despite the humor in the story, there are some valuable insights about what makes a family and how or if they can all forgive the one person who has created their fractured lives.

Madeline is in her early 30s and works on a farm in Tennessee with her mother.  Her father left the family 20 years earlier, and they had never heard from him again.  Mad is happy running the farm and thrilled that their organic farm has been written up in several national magazines.  She's kind of skittish around people and prefers to spend her time working at the farm.  One day, a man shows up at the farm.  He was in his 40s and explained to Mad that they had the same father, who left his family 20 years earlier and was never heard from again.  Rube said that the father was an author and insurance salesman.  Rube had hired a private investigator to try to find out more about his father.  When he found Mad, he told her that their father had at least two more children that he had left about 10 years apart.  Pepper is 21 and a basketball star in Oklahoma, where their father had been a coach.  Theron is 10, and his father, a filmmaker, had just recently left.  Rube invited Mad to travel with him to meet their half-siblings and then to go to California, where their father was living.  All of the half-siblings agreed, and they headed to California to find their father.  All four of them were only children and had to adjust to being part of a family instead of only being responsible for themselves. As their road trip continues, the four people begin to act like a family and take care of each other.  Will they find their father, and if they do, what kind of a person will they find?  Will he answer the questions that each child has for him, or will he disappear again??

I thought that the characters in this book were quirky, but they quickly became very endearing.  I was hoping that they would find their father and get answers to the questions that they had for him.  There was also a lot of humor in the story as the four of them made their road trip across the country and learned to live as part of a family.  This was definitely an enjoyable story.

Buy Run for the Hills at Amazon

Susan Roberts grew up in Michigan but loves the laid-back life at her home in the Piedmont area of North Carolina where she is three hours from the beach to the east and the mountains in the west.  She reads almost anything but her favorite genres are Southern Fiction and Historical Fiction.   

 

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