Making the Run - Softcover

Henson, Heather

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0064473392 ISBN 13: 9780064473392

Publisher: HarperTeen, 2003

Synopsis

All her life Lulu McClellan has heard the names. Growing up in a small Kentucky town, Lu has forever felt like she's on the outside looking in. Maybe that's why she takes pictures – to make sense of what she sees and feels but doesn't always understand.

Now that graduation is almost here, Lu and her friend Ginny are moving in a quick blur of drugs and drink. Lu thinks she's just marking time, waiting for the moment when life will begin for real.

But the road is full of unmarked twists and turns. Without warning, Lu free–falls into first love, white Ginny begins a deadly spiral into oblivion.

In stark, poetic prose, Heather Henson writes about what it means to come to a crucial crossroads and find the courage to make a run for the unknown.

Ages 12+

About this title

About the Author:

Heather Henson was born and raised in Kentucky and later moved to New York City, where she studied creative writing at the New School University and at City College/City University of New York. She has worked as an editor of books for young readers and as a freelance writer. Her short stories have appeared in the literary journal Promethean. She now lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and son. This is her first novel.

From School Library Journal:

Grade 10 Up-Almost 18 and about to graduate from her small-town Kentucky high school, Lu McClellan wastes her days and nights avoiding her father and using alcohol and drugs to numb the pain she still feels over her mother's sudden death when she was a child. Her best friend and drinking partner, Ginny, has no trouble with liquor-store clerks in the next county, at the end of the winding road that local kids habitually travel at dangerously high speeds. Lu is a "camerahead," always photographing the faces, postures, and scenes in which she finds herself, no matter how ubiquitous within her life. She and Ginny run in a crowd of kids with world outlooks that seem to stretch no further than attendance at the University of Kentucky after graduation. Lu's decade-older brother, a musician, has his own friends but watches over his sister and isn't pleased when his buddy Jay takes a romantic interest in her. Lu dreams of leaving town to go out west or maybe to New York. As their relationship becomes a sexual one, she thinks she can convince Jay to leave with her. Then Ginny dies in a car crash, forcing not only Lu, who feels she should have been with her friend, but also her father and Jay from the cocoons of selfishness each has built. Written in blunt and contemporarily savvy prose, this portrait of a girl on the brink of emerging from her past will have immediate appeal to many of her peers.
Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperTeen
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0064473392
• ISBN 13: 9780064473392
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240