Stealing Henry

Résumé

Grade 8 Up–Fed up with her alcoholic stepfather's violent ways and her mother's resignation, Savannah, 17, "brains him" with a frying pan and flees her New Jersey home, taking her 8-year-old half brother with her. They stop first at the apartment of a former boyfriend in New York, then move on to find a great-aunt in Maine whom the teen barely remembers, reversing their mother's path away from her roots. Intertwined with the story of Savannah and Henry's travels is their mother's story: how boredom in her small town and the arrival of an attractive stranger led to an unexpected pregnancy and years of driving around the country with her daughter until she found someone willing to marry a woman with a child. For Savannah, those years alone with her mother are rosy memories. She desperately misses the woman she remembers and hopes that her flight will somehow rekindle her spirit. MacCullough captures the panicky quality of the escape, telling the story obliquely but with intermittent flashes of minute detail. But because so much is implied rather than directly stated, Savannah's desperation is unconvincing. Readers are left with the uneasy feeling that in spite of her determination not to be like her mother, she may be following the same path.