Mary Wolf
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Permanently on the road, a teenage girl struggles to keep her family together
Sixteen-year-old Mary Wolf can remember when her family lived in a house, when her father was a successful insurance executive who would jump through sprinklers with his briefcase just to make her laugh. But he never got back on his feet after his business collapsed, and he had to move the whole Wolf family into a giant RV, taking them on the road for a permanent “vacation.” Now he drives Mary, her pregnant mother, and her three little sisters from city to city, where they stay at campgrounds and parks with other homeless people, never remaining in one place for long.
Mary’s mother has turned to petty theft to make ends meet and her dad loses his temper too much to hold down a job, but both insist that everything is going to be fine. Watching her parents increasingly deny the reality of their situation, Mary can feel it: Her whole family is coming to the end of a road.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At 16, Mary Wolf seems to be the only adult in her family. Her father, once an insurance executive, lost his job long ago and with it, apparently, his backbone. For two years the Wolfs have been traveling in an RV as the increasingly volatile Mr. Wolf occasionally lands and quickly loses menial jobs, supplementing his income with petty thievery and clumsy scams. Crippled by pride, he tells lies that Mrs. Wolf is all too eager to believe and that Mary's little sisters are too young to see through. Only Mary challenges him, but she cannot prevent him from driving the family into certain catastrophe. As in her dramatic psychological thriller Uncle Vampire, Grant establishes the desperation of lives ruled by nightmare, drawing the threads of her narrative ever tighter so that only extraordinary force can alter her characters' destinies. The climax is violent but not exploitative-it delivers a strongly cathartic jolt as the author expertly releases the reader from her darkly absorbing story. Ages 12-up.
