Running Toward Home by Betty Jane Hegerat

Posted by Pearl Fiction Sunday, October 10th, 2010

Running Toward Home by Betty Jane Hegerat. NeWest Press. 2006. 216 pp

Transferred between foster homes for most of his life, twelve-year-old Corey Brinkman has developed a bad habit of running away. His new foster parents, Wilma and Ben Howard, are determined to hold onto Corey, but old habits are hard to break.

Wilma takes Corey to the Calgary Zoo for his annual visit with his birth mother, despite her discomfort about Tina Brinkman and the fever Corey is pretending not to have. When Corey goes missing at the zoo, his two mothers are forced into an uneasy truce in the search for their son.

Running Toward Home reveals the complex relationships surrounding a foster child, and the fine line between protecting children and prohibiting the contact they most need. For twenty-four hours the Calgary Zoo becomes the entire world, and the lines between the nurturing instincts in animals and humans become blurred.

“Three deceptively simple strands-a mother, a foster mother and a runaway boy-are woven together against a slightly surreal backdrop of the Calgary Zoo at night, when tigers and dinosaurs roam free. Once joined, those strands form an emotional knot not unlike that at the heart, or in the stomach, of every family, from time to time, as its members run from and toward each other. Betty Jane Hegerat has written a small gem of a novel.” ~ Dave Margoshes

“From the warm-hearted foster parents, to the torn teen mother, to the social worker with an agenda, to wary Corey himself—Running Toward Home delivers the compelling details of a child stuck on a treadmill of government regulation and human vulnerability.” ~ Barb Howard

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