In Kevin Wilson’s latest, we have a different kind of sibling drama–one in which the siblings in question don’t even know the others exist. That is, until they’re thrown together in a PT Cruiser on a road trip to ambush–er, confront–the father who abandoned them all. When Madeline “Mad” Hill, a farmer in rural Coalfield, Tennessee, meets her older half-brother Rube, a mystery writer, the quiet life she’s built for herself is turned on its head. Likewise, when the two of them leave Coalfield together to seek out their younger half-sister Pepper, they disrupt a propulsive college basketball season. And it doesn’t stop there. As they collect still more siblings, more lives are interrupted, more trajectories diverted. But as the siblings get to know each other and themselves, they find that maybe the thing that was missing from each of their lives was each other. Traveling west, this group of just-introduced siblings follows the path and pieces together the puzzle of their shared, absent father–a man who methodically tried on different identities and shed them as he sought his own happiness, forsaking theirs. With heart, humor, and empathy, Kevin Wilson explores the divide between the family we’re born with and the family we choose, and what happens when they intersect.
Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson, (List Price: $28.99, Ecco, 9780063317512, May 2025)
Reviewed by Joyce McKinnon, Thank You Books in Birmingham, Alabama