Product Description

"Blindness will be like this." So says ten-year-old Will Burton, trying to reimagine his life in the wake of his father's abrupt disappearance, as his family picks up stakes and moves to California. Another boy, Rogelio Augilar, risks his life to cross the border illegally from Mexico to reach his father, enduring gangs, police roundups, and the pitiless desert. And Marlene McClure, a hard-edged, feisty teenager, leaves her own Midwestern home in search of a father she has imagined but never known. The lives of each of these families converge on a single home in Los Angeles where the very needs and desires that have torn them apart allow them a measure of hope together. Written with heart-stopping grace and a powerful understanding of the needs and desires that define family, "No Direction Home" masterfully evokes how far we will go in the name of a place to call home. Reading group guide included.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1628359 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-27
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .71" h x 6.66" w x 8.10" l, .61 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Inhabiting the uncomfortable space between loss and self-discovery, this debut novel by Silver (after the story collection Babe in Paradise) tells of missing fathers and the women and children they leave behind. Caroline, whose astronomer husband's departure dredges up memories of her father's abandonment, moves her twin 10-year-old sons, Will and Ethan, cross-country to Los Angeles to live with her parents. Caroline's father, motivated by decades-old guilt, has just hired a Mexican immigrant named Amador to care for his wife, who is quickly succumbing to dementia. Meanwhile, two willful teenagers, Marlene (Will and Ethan's illegitimate half-sister, the daughter of their absent father) and Rogelio (Amador's eldest son), embark on parallel, gritty expeditions in search of their fathers. Silver proves herself a deft juggler of plot lines and an effective realist; she conjures an aching world of half-truths, physical need and emotional frustration. Young Rogelio's adventures underground, in the lawless tunnels under the Mexican-American border, are particularly affecting, as are the struggles of Will, who suffers from a degenerative eye disorder and tries to learn to see the world "from the inside out" by observing his grandmother's mental meanderings. Despite some easy moralizing and overextended metaphors, this is a moving novel, each of its well-wrought characters finding some comfort in the "solace of in-between spaces." (June)
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From Booklist
Silver deftly tells the stories of three families whose struggles to survive are made tougher by depression, dementia, and traumatic separation. In Missouri, Caroline must raise her 10-year-old twin sons by herself when her husband's depression renders him unable to cope with "the messy, banal life of his family." The scene shifts to Los Angeles, where Caroline's father, Vincent, is overwhelmed by caring for his wife, Eleanor, a victim of dementia. Vincent employs Amador, a recent Mexican immigrant, to assist in Eleanor's care, and Amador is as intuitively gentle with her as Vincent is impatient. Next enters Marlene, a midwestern teenager who has grown up with an absent father. After her father appears for a brief visit, Marlene sets off for Los Angeles on a Greyhound bus to find him again. Just then Caroline migrates with her sons to her parents' home, and Amador's oldest son crosses the border to try and find his missing father. The three families merge in this perceptive look at the rippling effects of adversity on family dynamics. Deborah Donovan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
A deft juggler of plot lines. . . . [Silver] conjures an aching world of half-truths, physical need and emotional frustration.