“Strange people often came to the farm, but they tended to be late risers, so Mad knew the first few hours would be easy…Now she looked up to see a car driving down the dirt road, a PT Cruiser, which was not a car that you saw in this area. A man got out of the car, and he was dressed appropriately for a PT Cruiser, khakis and a baby-blue oxford shirt, hiking boots, a pair of flip-up sunglasses. He looked like he was in his forties.”
Those are some lines from the first chapter of Kevin Wilson’s novel Run for the Hills. The Tennessee farm is owned and run by thirty-two-year-old Mad Hill and her mom. The man in the PT Cruiser is forty-year-old Rube Hill from Boston. Rube is a mystery writer who hired a private detective to find his dad, Charles Hill, who just up and left when Rube was twelve. The detective discovered that Charles had basically started a whole new life every 10 years and that Rube was the first of at least four half siblings.
Rube decided to go on a quest to meet and collect his siblings and find and confront their dad. Charles was a mystery writer when he fathered Rube, an organic farmer when he fathered Mad, a basketball coach, and a cameraman. Every 10 years he would simply disappear from the family he had, head west, slightly change his first name, take up a new profession and father a
child.
As the book jacket says, this book “infused with deadpan wit, zany hijinks, and enormous heart, is a sibling story like no other—a novel about a family forged under the most unlikely circumstances and united by hope in an unknown future.”
If you’re looking for a sibling story like no other, then you must read Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson.
