Run for the Hills

by Kevin Wilson ★★★☆☆

It's 2007, and Madeline "Mad" Hill is wrapping up another Saturday on the farm she runs with her mother. A PT Cruiser pulls up, and an awkward man emerges nervously from the car. After exchanging pleasantries, he drops the bomb on the reason for his visit: he is the brother Mad never knew she had.

Half-brother, to be specific. Mad's father abruptly abandoned her and her mother when she was a girl, but it turns out he had done the same thing to his first family. And, he didn't stop after abandoning Mad. Four times in total, according to her half-brother Reuben (a.k.a. "Rube"), and the findings of the private investigator he hired to finally learn the truth. He's embarking on a journey to meet all four siblings, tracing the same path his father took as he moved west across the United States, and he'd like Mad to join him. Surprising no one more than herself, she agrees.

Their journey is fairly well mapped out: from Mad's farm in Tennessee, they will travel to meet their sister in Oklahoma, a brother in Utah, and if all goes according to plan, their journey will end by finding their father Charles Hill, who is reportedly in California. It's a chance for them to find family and connection where they did not know one existed, and to potentially confront their father if they can find him at the end of the journey. Their father's abrupt departures have left scars on all of the children, but more than a decade separates each of them, and so the impact manifests to differing degrees depending on how long each child has had to process the event.

Charles Hill's progeny are at once similar and vastly different. At one point, Rube considers his newfound family: "He looked at his siblings, who were made of the things he was made of, and he wondered who made them the way that they were." The strange circumstances surrounding the union of the characters in the novel end up evoking interesting questions around nature vs. nurture. They also make the reader ponder the role bloodlines and family play, even when family members are effectively strangers. The four Hill children have never met each other, yet because of their shared blood and one traumatic shared life experience, they form a bond. "She nodded to him, and he nodded back. That was all family had to be, at the most basic level, someone seeing you, even if you didn't know what they saw."

Like his other books, Wilson writes dialogue-heavy prose enmeshed with quirky characters. But compared to Wilson's Nothing To See Here—which found just the right balance of humor, heart, and absurdity—Run for the Hills feels diminished. The balance is there, but each of those components is muted by comparison. The book is fine, the premise is somewhat interesting, but it failed to unlock anything more than a so-so reaction from me across any of those components. If you're looking to read a Kevin Wilson novel, try Nothing to See Here instead; Run for the Hills can be skipped.