The Runaways
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1.0 • 1 Rating
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- $1.99
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
From three-time Newbery Medal winner Zilpha Keatley Snyder comes the story of three desperate kids who just want to run away
Dani O'Donnell hates the dusty desert town of Rattler Springs and the ramshackle cabin where she lives with her widowed mother. On the eve of her thirteenth birthday, Dani hatches a plan to run away and return home to Sea Grove, California, with its palm trees and ocean breezes.
But her scheme gets complicated when Stormy Arigotti, a dyslexic nine-year-old, decides he wants in. As if that weren't enough, a big-city family just set up shop on the rundown ranch Dani's mother inherited from her husband—and the daughter, Pixie Smithson, wants to join the runaway group. Pixie's the strangest girl Dani has ever met, but now they have to think about practical things, like raising money for three bus tickets.
For Dani, Stormy, and Pixie, running away might not turn out to be the great adventure they envisioned.
This ebook features an extended biography of Zilpha Keatley Snyder.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Snyder (The Gypsy Game) pulls off another feat of prestidigitation with this roundly satisfying story set in 1951. Coming from almost anyone else, the plot and cast of characters might sound stale: three smart kids--one resentful of her mother's passivity and bumbling; one neglected and abused by his mother; and one whose parents are too busy for her--decide to run away but then don't need to after all. Snyder, however, can invest her characters with inner resources that are both extreme and believable, and readers will gravitate to her protagonist, 12-year-old Dani O'Donnell, right from the opening scene in a graveyard. There Dani, shaking her fist in the air, vows to move away from the hateful desert town of Rattler Springs, where she and her well-meaning but seemingly inept mother have lived for four years. Her pesky, book-loving younger neighbor, Stormy Arigotti, blackmails Dani into agreeing to take him along, and while they are in the process of raising funds, they meet Pixie Smithson. The preternaturally self-possessed, truth-twisting daughter of a geologist couple doing a short project in Rattler Springs, Pixie soon enlists in the running-away plan too. The trio's strategies for escape are only the most superficial sources of tension here; the deepening view of the children's home lives and Dani's growing affection for Stormy and Pixie prove steadily more engrossing. Even the minor characters here seem to have lives off the page. Ages 8-12.
