Run Away with Me

Jessie Violet Swift and Brooke Summers are both seventeen and female. Other than that, their family circumstances could ostensibly not be more different. Brooke Summers is conventionally beautiful, popular and from a high-achieving family where her future seems to be entirely mapped out.

Jessie Swift, known to everyone at school as mouse, because she is quiet, shy and wants to fade into the background, is brought up by her hard-working, single mother and her mother’s extensive string of boyfriends. The family are well known to the American equivalent of Social Services.

When Jessie gets home one day, she finds her mother’s boyfriend gruesomely dead on the hall floor. Jessie hasn’t killed him but she is afraid of being accused of murder, so she attempts to get to a bus station and leave Seattle. On the way to the bus station, however, she meets Brooke in her restored vintage Mustang, and they agree to run away together. Neither knows what the other is running from. They just know they each need to leave.

How will the road trip pan out? And how will their relationship change?

This is a brilliant and nuanced road-trip thriller which also includes examination of human relationships under stress, romance and sexual abuse. Every reader will be rooting for Jessie and Brooke. This book is not suitable for readers under fourteen years of age.