Breakaway Books

Authored by Kevin Wilson; Published May 2025; Fiction

⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️

If you want to remember the kind of gifts—and annoyances—that siblings can present, Run for the Hills will do that for you.

Run for the Hills follows four half-siblings—one father, four mothers—as they band together to confront their dad, a proven master at abandoning his children. Rube, the oldest, spearheads a road trip across the country, repeatedly breaking the news to each of the siblings (Mad, Pep, and Tom) about their father’s multiple families, before they set off together for California to find the man himself and the answer to the question they all ask: Why? 

This novel is a love song to sibling bonding. The father, Charles Hill, has clearly impacted all of his children deeply, both by his presence and by his absence. While of course there is trauma and sadness in his abandonment, there is joy in the discovery that all the siblings share something, that they are all tied together and understand aspects of each other that no one else can. To put a fine point on it, they were alone, and they are no longer, because they have found each other. That being said, I cannot believe that each of them agrees (and some enthusiastically!) to drive across the country with virtual strangers. The idea of being trapped in a car and having to figure out idle chit chat or an agreeable radio station with people who are both close and completely unfamiliar to me makes me cringe. Of course, in this novel, it is instead (mostly) a humorous adventure.

I wish there were a satisfying answer for the kids for why their father keeps leaving his progeny behind. But what answer could there possibly be? The only one they find is the realistic one—he is not quite right in the head. Nothing that would come across as an obvious mental illness, but their father seems chronically unable to face the consequences of his actions, to commit to one single life or one single profession. In California, he serves as a caretaker of sorts for three eccentric heiresses, none of whom are romantically interested in him. His situation, as the siblings discover it, seems a little anticlimactic, but again: What more can there be for him? I was a little surprised, I suppose, by how quickly his children let him off the hook for his horrid behavior, but for Rube, Mad and even Pep, they already spent years perseverating on the question of his departureand coming to peace with his decisions.

Run for the Hills is, in turns, humorous and heartening. If you love your siblings, or perhaps if you want to learn to value them a little more, pick it up.