Stealing Our Way Home
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the award-winning author of The Patron Saint of Butterflies and The World from Up Here comes a story about grieving hearts, broken families, and how speaking out can save them both.Saying goodbye is never easy.Everything changed after Pippa and Jack's mother died last spring. Pippa stopped speaking, Jack started picking fights, and their father's struggling business began to fail. Now, with school starting again, Pippa doesn't know how she'll manage a class presentation on Spartan warriors when she can't even find the words to tell her father that she wishes he were home more. And Jack is struggling to understand his feelings for the mysterious girl next door. But when Jack and Pippa realize that their dad is getting so desperate for cash to keep the family afloat that he might be going to extreme -- and illegal -- lengths to make ends meet, they are faced with the biggest decision of their lives. How far are they willing to go to keep their family together?Stealing Our Way Home is a poignant, deeply affecting novel about falling apart, finding your voice, and the power of letting go.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Galante's deeply empathic novel told in alternating chapters by 10-year-old Pippa and her 12-year-old brother, Jack explores sibling bonds, parental fallibility, and coping with death. After Pippa and Jack's mother dies from cancer, their father loses control of his work, their home, and their family life, though he does a good job of loving his children while faking competence. Jack and Pippa, who hasn't spoken since her mother's death, both demonstrate resilience as they slowly realize that, as much as their father loves them, they can no longer count on him to be a reliable caregiver. When he takes extreme measures to secure their financial stability (and involves Jack), the children finally understand the precariousness of their situation; though the father's desperate act seems improbable, Galante (The World from up Here) renders it entirely believable. Narrated in first-person present tense, the story has immediacy and strong momentum, both in terms of plot and emotional development. Supportive secondary characters with strong backstories are fully dimensional, and the setting modest homes on a lake in Vermont comes wholly to life. Ages 8 12.
