“RUN FOR THE HILLS” by Kevin Wilson (Ecco, 256 pages, $30).
In “Run for the Hills,” Sewanee, Tennessee, author Kevin Wilson takes readers on an unconventional road trip with four siblings eager to ask some hard questions of their long-lost father.
Thirty-two-year-old Madeline “Mad” Hill is stunned when Rueben “Rube” Hill shows up at the organic farm she runs with her mother and announces he is her half-brother. He goes on to explain that their father left Rube and his mother in Boston when he was a child, years before he left Mad and her mother in rural Tennessee in the same sudden, unexplained manner.
Rube also informs Mad that they have at least two other half-siblings, born after their father left Tennessee. He proposes that they join forces to cross the country in search of their dad, whom Rube believes to be in California, with stops to visit their younger sister in Oklahoma and younger brother in Utah, who were also left behind.
Since her father’s departure when she was 10 years old, practical and down-to-earth Mad has rarely left the farm, instead working tirelessly beside her mother to turn it into a successful business. She hasn’t had time for much more in her life, and the thought of taking off on such an outlandish quest with a stranger, on the way to meet up with other strangers, seems impossible.