Disappear Home
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
In 1970, as the hippie movement is losing its innocence, Shoshanna and her six-year-old sister, Mara, escape from Sweet Earth Farm, a declining commune, run by their tyrannical and abusive father, Adam. Their mother, Ella, takes them to San Francisco, where they meet one of her old friends, Judy, and the four of them decide to head off and try to make a life together. Finding a safe haven at the farm of kind, elderly Avery Elliot, the four of them find some measure of peace and stability. Then their mother's crippling depression returns. Confused and paranoid, Ella is convinced that she and the girls must leave before Adam finds them and extracts revenge. The girls don’t wish to leave the only stable home they’ve ever had. But as Ella grows worse and worse, events conspire to leave them to face a choice they never could have imagined. Shoshanna has always watched over her sister and once again she has to watch over her ailing mother. Will she ever live a "normal" life?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in 1970, Hurwitz's nerve-wracking YA novel opens with a family of three running from Sweet Earth Farm, the commune that has been their home for the past five years. Fourteen-year-old Shoshanna Ebersole, mother Ella, and younger sister Mara steal the commune's station wagon and flee from Oregon to their former home of San Francisco to escape the girls' abusive father, Adam, the commune's founder, whose "philosophy of political anarchy, free love, and rampant drug use" morphed into a violent reality. When they arrive back in the Haight, Judy, an old friend of Ella's, sets them up with jobs on a farm in nearby Half Moon Bay where Shoshanna and Mara begin to feel a measure of safety and security. Hurwitz (the Adventures of Riley series) establishes a strong sense of tension that never lets up the question of whether Adam will find the runaways looms over the story. While the ending resolves the girls' troubles rather neatly, Shoshanna's resilience is on full display as she tries to keep both her mother and sister safe. Ages 12 up.
