Running Away With Frannie
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
From the celebrated author of 'Above the Thunder', a novel about wanderlust and reconciliation with family. Sam meets Frannie in a West Virginia truck stop where she is a waitress on the verge of being fired for flushing a potato down the men’s room toilet. Sam has tried five colleges in five different states and has worked an endless variety of jobs, including mail carrier, hospital orderly, factory drudge, and children’s birthday party clown. It isn’t until he encounters Frannie — who has moved forty-eight times in two years and who believes that her destiny, like that of all the great wanderers in history, will be revealed in the journeys she undertakes — that his restless heart meets its match. However, as this pair of young nomads fall in love, they realize that staying together means, at least for a time, staying in one place. And as Sam tries to link his past with the present, he hopes to disprove the prediction his father, now deceased, once made for him: “The whole world is divided into runners and chasers. You’re either running toward, or you’re running away. You’ve spent your whole life trying to escape”.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Manfredi's winning 20-something road trip novel, Sam Segretti is fleeing Pittsburgh to get away from his family and sometime girlfriend when he encounters Frannie Swidden, a just-fired waitress at a West Virginia truck stop. She asks him for a ride out of town; they're in love before they reach North Carolina. Obsessed with African myth and mysticism, Frannie is insightful and enigmatic, infusing an otherwise standard boy-meets-girl with a capricious, tormenting lightness. As the story unfurls, and the prospects for love and togetherness become increasingly remote, Manfredi skillfully guides the two through haunting feelings of isolation, anonymity, and the impossibility of eternal happiness. Franni's wild, indefatigable yet softspoken innocence steals the show, giving nuance to the terrors of her and Sam's bruised childhoods. The tenderness of the narrative belies the difficulty of Sam and Franni's lives, and the undercurrent of doom that shadows them to the end.
