Ever since her dad left them twenty years ago, it’s been just Madeline Hill and her mom on their farm in Coalfield, Tennessee. While it’s a bit lonely, she sometimes admits, and a less exciting life than what she imagined for herself, it’s mostly okay. Mostly. Then one day Reuben Hill pulls up in a PT Cruiser and informs Madeline that he believes she’s his half sister. Reuben—left behind by their dad thirty years ago—has hired a detective to track down their father and a string of other half siblings. And he wants Mad to leave her home and join him for the craziest kind of road trip imaginable to find them all. As Mad and Rube—and eventually the others—share stories of their father, who behaved so differently in each life he created, they begin to question what he was looking for with every new incarnation. Who are they to one another? What kind of man will they find? And how will these new relationships change Mad’s previously solitary life on the farm?
It’s a fantastic hook that begins a mostly jaunty series of cascading episodes that feel tailor-made to be adapted into a limited series ... A touching and generous romp of a novel, a sort of lighthearted family heist in which the anticipated grift is simply a meeting (or confrontation?) with the characters’ father. The results of their quest are, frankly, beside the point.
As usual, Wilson’s writing is funny in a way that hurts just a little ... There’s nothing so extreme in Run for the Hills, which may disappoint Wilson fans, but what it lacks in weird it makes up in heart.
Wilson continues to write about family, the most universal topic there is, in unimaginably unique ways ... Adorable ... One always wonders, with Wilson, if all the arch wordplay and kooky plotting is going to get in the way of real feeling and believable characters ... Real feeling and believable characters? Not a problem. Kevin Wilson continues to do whimsy with as much heart as any writer ever has.
