This image is the cover for the book Mary Wolf

Mary Wolf

Permanently on the road, a teenage girl struggles to keep her family together

Sixteen-year-old Mary Wolf can remember when her family lived in a house, when her father was a successful insurance executive who would jump through sprinklers with his briefcase just to make her laugh. But he never got back on his feet after his business collapsed, and he had to move the whole Wolf family into a giant RV, taking them on the road for a permanent “vacation.” Now he drives Mary, her pregnant mother, and her three little sisters from city to city, where they stay at campgrounds and parks with other homeless people, never remaining in one place for long.

Mary’s mother has turned to petty theft to make ends meet and her dad loses his temper too much to hold down a job, but both insist that everything is going to be fine. Watching her parents increasingly deny the reality of their situation, Mary can feel it: Her whole family is coming to the end of a road.

Cynthia D. Grant

Cynthia D. Grant has published twelve young adult fiction novels since 1980. In 1991 she won the first PEN/Norma Klein Award, for “an emerging voice among American writers of children’s fiction.” Over the years, Grant has received numerous other distinctions. Unfortunately, her Massachusetts upbringing prohibits her from showing off. She lives in the mountains outside Cloverdale, California, and has one husband, Eric Neel; two sons, Morgan Heatley-Grant and Forest Neel-Grant; two cats, Kelsey, an orange tom, and Billie, a barn cat–barracuda mix; and Mike the Wonder Dog, who packs two-hundred-plus pounds of personality into a seven-pound body.

Open Road Integrated Media