Running Away to Home

How do you find your way home when your home no longer exists? For 17 year old twins Sammy and Ronnie and their father, Willis, the answer to that question becomes a life raft when they are separated during the Hurricane Katrina evacuation. Running Away to Home, a verse novel, tells the story of two brave sisters, a repentant father, and the amazing triumph of familial love. "Running Away to Home is a riveting page turner that will keep you engaged from beginning to end--no matter your age. Hooper skillfully uses poetry to give voice to the survivors of storms whose experiences deserve amplification. You will be moved." -Samantha Thornhill, poet of Odetta: Queen of Folk "Fate and faith tangle with coincidence, conspiracy and the cataclysm of Hurricane Katrina in Lita Hooper's exciting Running Away to Home, where a family's life and sense of self and community is rearranged like cheap furniture in the ravenous wake of nature and neglect. Evacuation and displacement uproot twin daughters from their careless father battling the bottle, haunted by his wife's sudden death. The two girls (and their distressed father), torn from one another by bureaucracy and the "quiet thief" of water, attempt to make it back to each other in the midst of another storm brewing-of sex, sin and pseudo-salvation to turn them asunder. Lita Hooper's masterful meditation on family, Running Away to Home, shows us that manmade disasters can be just as ruinous as natural ones; and that hurricanes may take away one's home with sudden, sweeping, devastating force, but they will never take away one's humanity-for that is where the heart is." -Tony Medina, author of The President Looks Like Me & Other Poems