Customer Reviews

Walk Away Home

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Nick doesn't really try to find trouble; it just seems that he does things and trouble follows him, like when he sneaks into an abandoned house where his aunt used to live and he accidentally sets part of the place on fire. It wasn't really his fault, but it's difficult to get others to see it that way. In the end of his junior year in high school, Nick managed to find his way into enough trouble that a judge intervened and told his parents they would have to do something. Their decision to enroll Nick in military school for his senior year doesn't thrill their son.

Nick's parents have been pretty distant for a long time, anyway, and so he doesn't think they will really mind when they take off for a week's vacation and he takes off walking--the main way he clears his mind and finds peace. He walks for days, across the state to where his favorite aunt, Wanda, is now living in a little hippie community. She always seems to understand him.

Life in Wanda's world is strange. Her neighbors are all free spirits, mostly going by pseudonyms and very fond of wild impromptu parties. Their lifestyle is offensive to the teenaged sons and daughters of the very rich people who live in an exclusive neighborhood next door, though, so the hippie parties are often broken up by trash being thrown by the rich kids. One of those kids is Diana, whom Nick feels an instant connection to.

Diana is strange in her own way, though, seeming to hate her father for reasons she won't talk about, and acting very moody most of the time. As the summer goes on and Nick tries to decide what he is going to do next, he finds that everyone's life is more complex than he thought.

I liked Wanda's community of hippies. I liked the way they all lived so happily with each other and did their best to help each other out. I also liked the ending of the book and the way the story resolved itself.

I didn't like Nick as a narrator for this story. He didn't seem invested enough in his own life, and I never got a really good picture of him in my mind because he didn't seem to care a whole lot about his story. I thought Diana was a completely unsympathetic character, mostly because of the way she reacted to Nick the first few times she met him. I didn't trust her at all and was surprised when she was telling the truth.

"Walk Away Home" is not such a good book. I personally didn't enjoy it much at all. I think maybe one of the reasons I didn't like the book is because it is probably for kids in high school, and I'm in junior high. The book is basically about a boy in high school, Nick, who leaves his home one day and walks to his aunt's house. At his aunt's house, he meets a girl, Diana, who is having some very bad problems with her family. Throughout the book Nick, who tells the story, is trying to help this girl with her problems. Overall, even if you are a kid in high school, I still don't think you would like this book much. It is rather boring because it seems like it takes too long for Nick and Diana to find a solution to Diana's family problems.

I liked the weird people who lived with Nick's aunt and have names like Rode Kool and OK Sunbeam and the place where all of them live which is called "Happiness Far" (It was a farm and the m fell off the sign.) Also how Nick and his girlfriend find a way to get into houses where nobody lives that are up for sale and hang out there. There was also interesting things that Nick wrote about his habit of walking like at one time everything in the world was in walking distance, since it had to be, since people only walked. This was fun to read but made you think, too.