In Kevin Wilson’s latest novel, Run for the Hills, he crafts a captivating narrative about the unexpected ways family can form and reform across time and distance. Known for his ability to blend humor with poignant emotional moments in works like Nothing to See Here and The Family Fang, Wilson continues this tradition with a road trip story that feels both utterly unique and somehow universal.
The novel follows Madeline “Mad” Hill, a thirty-two-year-old woman who has spent her entire life on her family’s organic farm in Coalfield, Tennessee. When Reuben “Rube” Hill arrives in a PT Cruiser claiming to be her half-brother, Mad’s carefully ordered world tilts on its axis. Their shared father, it seems, made a habit of creating families and then abandoning them, leaving a trail of children from Massachusetts to California. What follows is an improbable journey across America as the siblings collect each other and search for the father who left them all behind.
A Masterclass in Character Development
Wilson excels at creating characters who feel startlingly real despite their eccentric circumstances. Mad’s practical stoicism serves as the perfect counterpoint to Rube’s emotional volatility. At forty-four, Rube is a successful mystery novelist still wrestling with childhood abandonment issues. His initial impulse to track down their father morphs from thoughts of revenge to a desperate need for connection.
The siblings they pick up along the way—Pepper “Pep” Hill, a college basketball star, and eleven-year-old Theron “Tom” Goudy, a self-described “low-budget independent filmmaker”—round out their unlikely family band. Each brings their own perspective and emotional baggage to the journey, creating a rich tapestry of intersecting lives.
What makes these characters work is Wilson’s commitment to their contradictions. They’re simultaneously damaged and resilient, guarded and yearning for connection. As Mad reflects, “It was strange, how time gets away from us.” Wilson understands that people are products not just of their genetics but of the specific absences in their lives, and Mad, who has never left Tennessee before this journey, finds herself reconsidering what family means and who she might be beyond the boundaries of her farm.
The Search for a Shape-Shifting Father
The novel’s most intriguing element may be Charles Hill himself—the father who reinvented himself multiple times, leaving families in his wake. With each new location, he transformed: from a mystery writer in Boston to an organic farmer in Tennessee to a basketball coach in Oklahoma to a filmmaker in Utah. What connects these personas, besides the man inhabiting them, remains the central mystery of the book.
When the siblings finally locate their father in California, living as a groundskeeper on a vast estate owned by wealthy sisters with “horse names” (Lucky, Haze, and Moon), the confrontation is simultaneously anticlimactic and deeply moving. Their father, now an elderly man with yet another young child, can offer no satisfying explanation for his behavior: “…but I don’t have an easy answer for you. I’m never going to satisfy you because there’s no good reason for a man to leave his family over and over and never see them again.”
Wilson resists easy psychological explanations. The father’s actions remain inexplicable even to himself, leaving his children—and readers—to grapple with the unsatisfying truth that some wounds cannot be neatly closed.
Road Trip as Metaphor
The physical journey across America mirrors the emotional journey of the siblings. Wilson uses the changing landscape to reflect the shifting dynamics between characters who are simultaneously strangers and family. From Tennessee through Oklahoma to Utah and finally California, the siblings navigate not just highways but also the complex terrain of their shared genetics and separate upbringings.
The vehicle itself—first a PT Cruiser, then a Chevrolet HHR after a near-fatal accident—becomes both literal conveyance and metaphorical container for their evolving relationships. As Mad observes, “When you imagined him in his new iteration, he was already gone, had moved on, so everything wavered in your brain like a ghost or a wisp of smoke.” The same could be said for the siblings’ understanding of each other and themselves.
Wilson’s Signature Style
Longtime fans of Wilson will recognize his trademark blend of absurdist humor and emotional depth. Whether it’s Tom trying to convince strangers to play a slot machine for him, Mad winning $4,000 on said machine, or the siblings discovering their father named his newest child Reuben (same as his firstborn), Wilson finds the perfect balance between comedy and pathos.
His prose remains deceptively simple yet precise, capturing complex emotional states with startling clarity. When Mad reflects on finding her siblings: “She was a gift to someone else. She had never felt like that before in her entire life. Not once,” Wilson distills a lifetime of loneliness into a moment of connection.
Where the Novel Stumbles
For all its strengths, Run for the Hills occasionally overreaches. The structure, divided into chapters that alternate between the road trip and snippets of home movies from each sibling’s childhood, sometimes disrupts the narrative flow. These interstitial “film” segments, while thematically relevant, can feel more like clever devices than organic parts of the story.
Additionally, the revelation that Tom isn’t actually their father’s biological child feels underdeveloped, introduced late in the novel without the space to fully explore its implications. This plot point, along with the news of the father’s illness, creates an emotional pile-up in the final chapters that slightly undermines the careful pacing of earlier sections.
Some readers might also find the ending too open-ended. While Mad returns to her farm and Pep to her college, Rube and Tom remain with their father in California, creating a fragmented resolution that reflects the messy reality of family ties but may not satisfy those seeking neater closure.
A Novel of Our Fractured Times
Despite these minor flaws, Run for the Hills offers a compelling exploration of family in an age of disconnection. In a world where genealogy websites and DNA tests regularly reveal family secrets, Wilson’s novel feels remarkably timely. His characters struggle with questions that resonate beyond their specific circumstances: What makes a family? How do we reconcile who we are with where we came from? Can we forge meaningful connections across the gaps left by absence?
The strength of the novel lies in its refusal to provide easy answers. Instead, it suggests that meaning emerges not from answers but from the questions themselves and from the people with whom we choose to share them.
Final Verdict: A Journey Worth Taking
Run for the Hills stands as one of Wilson’s most accomplished works, building on themes he explored in The Family Fang and Nothing to See Here while breaking new emotional ground. Like the road trip at its center, the novel takes unexpected detours, hits occasional rough patches, but ultimately delivers readers to a destination worth reaching.
For fans of family dramas with an eccentric edge—works by authors like Ann Patchett, Elizabeth Strout, or Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney—Wilson’s latest offers a deeply satisfying reading experience. It reminds us that families, whether formed by blood or choice, are as much about the journeys we take together as the places we end up.
In a culture obsessed with ancestry and origins, Run for the Hills makes a compelling case that what matters most is not who made us, but who we choose to become and who we choose to keep close along the way. As Mad tells Rube near the novel’s end: “You’ll always have me. Anything else that happens, you’ll always have me. And Pep. And Tom. You have us now… You’re not alone.” In a fractured world, there are few promises more powerful.