RUNNING AWAY

A teenage girl runs away from her home to escape her stepfather in this revised edition of a YA novel by the author.

Fifteen-year-old Maggie tells her mom she’s going away on a weekend camping trip with a friend, but really, she’s planning to run away. The problem is Richard, her mother’s new husband, whom they recently moved in with. Her mother, Peg, thinks Richard is a sweetheart—though she realizes he’s a bit controlling, and she doesn’t like that he’s started drinking a lot since losing his job. She can’t understand why Maggie has been so difficult lately. What Peg doesn’t realize is that Richard has been touching Maggie inappropriately. Maggie gets on a bus to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania—a place she seems to have chosen because she saw its name on an old school notebook of her mother’s—and she’s unknowingly following in Peg’s own footsteps when she ran away as a teenager. Maggie has taken Peg’s journal with her, which leads her to discover things about her mother’s past that she never suspected. Meanwhile, back at home, Richard tells Peg that Maggie has been behaving suggestively toward him. “I hate to have to tell you this,” he says, “but, she was blatantly coming on to me. I had to physically push her away from me. She started to attack me then, and I had to restrain her.” Will Peg believe him, or will she discover the truth in time to save her daughter from making the same mistakes she once made? The point of view alternates between Maggie and Peg, revealing how blind Peg is to Richard’s behavior: “He only had one beer tonight, and he’ll drink less when our financial issues are resolved. There’s really no reason to give up on our marriage. He’s very loving and tender, and he is doing his best to be a father to the girls, even when Maggie’s been awful.” The novel takes a while to get going, and several of the chapters seem superfluous to the plot. That said, the book realistically portrays an instance of sexual abuse and how one parent might be blind to it—even if that blindness is somewhat willful.

A tense and unsettling portrait of a family torn apart by a predator in its midst.