FREE: " THE WAY THE FAMILY GOT AWAY " By Michael Kimball

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This is the way the family got away. They pack all the things they can fit into the car and place the body of their dead son in the toy box and put him in the trunk. They leave Mineola, Texas and head across the terrifying, vacant landscape of mid-America to Bompa's house in Michigan. In every place they visit, they sell off what they can to make it to the next town. They keep going to keep the family together.

The Way the Family Got Away (Four Wall Eight Windows; 4th Estate, 2000) is the remarkable story of the journey seen through the eyes of the family's surviving children, a young boy and his younger sister, and of the ways loss makes itself felt through a child's imagination. On the journey, they try to make sense of their brother's death, why they must leave home, and how they get from one place to the next. Through their stories, they relate the miles they gain and the things they lose along the way. The Way the Family Got Away is a moving, unforgettable story.

"Kimball's first novel ... is moving and clever: the open road, so long a symbol of freedom and self-discovery in American fiction, is here rendered as denuded of promise, embodying desertion, desolation and rootlessness. ... Kimball's novel reads as parable about the death of the family, of how impossible family life is in a numbedly materialistic society. However, the largeness of the message should not detract from the intricacy of fine, precise storytelling ... he has taken it [American literature] somewhere very dark and unsettling."