Product Description

"It's a cold, hard, cruel fact that my mother loved heroin more than she loved me."

Holly is in her fifth foster home in two years and she's had enough. She's run away before and always been caught quickly. But she's older and wiser now--she's twelve--and this time she gets away clean.

Through tough and tender and angry and funny journal entries, Holly spills out her story. We travel with her across the country--hopping trains, scamming food, sleeping in parks or homeless encampments. And we also travel with her across the gaping holes in her heart--as she finally comes to terms with her mother's addiction and death.

Runaway is a remarkably uplifting portrait of a girl still young and stubborn and naive enough to hold out hope for finding a better place in the world, and within herself, to be.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1005066 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-12
• Released on: 2006-09-12
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 8.56" h x .95" w x 5.94" l, .84 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

From School Library Journal
Grade 6-8–Readers wont look at homeless people in quite the same way after meeting Holly and seeing her through five long months on her own. An urban, female version of Gary Paulsens Hatchet (Macmillan, 1986), this novel chronicles the daily struggle for food, shelter, safety, and cleanliness that becomes the focus of life once a home and income are stripped away. Twelve-year-old Holly knows a lot about living on the streets, since she lived that life with her drug-addicted mother before the womans death from an overdose. She determines that it is preferable to continuing in her abusive foster home. A journal provided by a compassionate teacher is where she records her lonely and difficult struggle for survival. While the plot has the occasional convenience, readers will be drawn to the gripping details of both physical and emotional landmines hidden in the ordinariness of everyday life. This is a great book to hand-sell or booktalk to young teens who enjoy a dose of emotional trauma in their fiction or for reluctant readers who need suspense to keep them turning the pages. Van Draanen has shown great versatility in adding another dimension to her already respected body of work.–Faith Brautigam, Gail Borden Public Library, Elgin, IL
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
From May until November, Holly writes in her journal, by turns fierce, angry, scared, heartbroken, defiant. Her teacher gave Holly the journal in the hopes of allowing her to work through her mother's overdose and stays in a succession of foster homes. But Holly has more immediate issues--hunger and shelter and not being cold. Running away again from an abusive foster family, she makes her way by stealth and cunning to Los Angeles. She writes poetry in her journal, too--vivid and wired poems that it seems a smart 12-year-old actually could write. She refuses to see herself as homeless, but as a gypsy, making a home where she can--libraries and schools are among her favorite places to hide. As her situation gets increasingly desperate, readers long for Holly to find a bath and a hot meal and someone to care for her. The ending of this taut, powerful story seems possible and deeply hopeful. GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
“Readers will be drawn to the gripping details of both physical and emotional landmines hidden in the ordinariness of everyday life. This is a great book to hand-sell or booktalk to young teens. . . . Van Draanen has shown great versatility in adding another dimension to her already respected body of work.”–School Library Journal

“Readers will be drawn to Holly as she shifts between her search for a safe place to live, her anger at the foster care system and her reflections on the circumstances that led up to her mother’s overdose.”–Publishers Weekly


From the Paperback edition.