Stealing Henry

"The night Savannah brains her stepfather with the frying pan is the night she decides to leave home for good."

Fleeing from her stepfather's wrath, Savannah and her half brother, Henry, travel north toward their mother Alice's childhood home. As the runaways embark upon their journey, another story begins to unfold: glimpses of Alice as a teenager, caught in poignant first love and completely anaware of all the consequences love can carry.

The night Savannah brains her stepfather with the frying pan is the night she decides to leave home for good."

Fleeing from her stepfather's wrath, Savannah and her half brother, Henry, travel north toward their mother Alice's childhood home. As the runaways embark upon their journey, another story begins to unfold: glimpses of Alice as a teenager, caught in poignant first love and completely unaware of all the consequences love can carry.

School Library Journal

Gr 8 Up-Fed up with her alcoholic stepfather's violent ways and her mother's resignation, Savannah, 17, "brains him" with a frying pan and flees her New Jersey home, taking her 8-year-old half brother with her. They stop first at the apartment of a former boyfriend in New York, then move on to find a great-aunt in Maine whom the teen barely remembers, reversing their mother's path away from her roots. Intertwined with the story of Savannah and Henry's travels is their mother's story: how boredom in her small town and the arrival of an attractive stranger led to an unexpected pregnancy and years of driving around the country with her daughter until she found someone willing to marry a woman with a child. For Savannah, those years alone with her mother are rosy memories. She desperately misses the woman she remembers and hopes that her flight will somehow rekindle her spirit. MacCullough captures the panicky quality of the escape, telling the story obliquely but with intermittent flashes of minute detail. But because so much is implied rather than directly stated, Savannah's desperation is unconvincing. Readers are left with the uneasy feeling that in spite of her determination not to be like her mother, she may be following the same path.-Kathleen Isaacs, formerly at Edmund Burke School, Washington, DC Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Carolyn MacCullough is the author of Falling Through Darkness, a New York Public Library Best Book for the Teen Age, a VOYA "Author Talk" selection, and praised by Kirkus as "an emotional page-turner."