She Treads Softly: Run for the Hills

Saturday, April 26, 2025

Run for the Hills

Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson
5/13/25; 256 pages
Ecco

Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson is a humorous, uplifting, very highly recommended road trip novel featuring half-siblings finding each other while on a cross-country journey looking for their father.

Madeline (Mad) Hill, 32 years-old, and her mom run their organic farm in Coalfield, Tennessee together after her father left twenty years years ago. Then Reuben (Rube) Hill, in his forties, pulls up to their farm stand in a PT Cruiser and informs Mad that she is his half sister. Their father left Rube thirty years ago in Boston. He hired a detective and knows of two other half siblings, Pepper (Pep) Hill, a 21 year-old college basketball star in Oklahoma, and Theron (Tom) who is 11 years-old and living in Utah. Rube has a last address of their father living in Northern California. Mad agrees to accompany Rube to meet Pep, Tom, and hopefully find the father who left each of them, reinventing himself along the way.

Hilarious, heart-warming, quirky, and hopeful truly describe this well-written cross-country dysfunctional family adventure. I was totally immersed in the intriguing and masterfully written story throughout and loved this story. It follows the siblings as they meet each other, travel together, and learn about how their father reinvented himself into a whole different person each time he moved on. They all grew up as single children so any sibling is a new experience.

The characters are all portrayed as unique individuals who are all very different from each other in personalities and interests, but they still see shared characteristics between them, with Tom being the exception which is explained. They also share the heartbreak 0f a father who left them when they were children and never contacted them again. It has an impact on them, as does the version of their father they experienced individually. They all have very different memories of their father.

Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson is perfect for anyone seeking an entertaining road trip novel. Thanks to Ecco for providing me with an advance reader's copy via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.