Runaround (review)

Eleven-year-old Sassy wants to know how love works, but no one will tell her anything except that she's too young to think about it. Think about it she does, though, swallowing whole the stories she reads in Love Confessions magazine. Deciding that her older neighbor Boon Chisholm is going to be her boyfriend, she flirts shamelessly with him, taking his embarrassed but roguish responses as proof that he loves her. Her older sister Lula finds out about Sassy's flirtation and tries to explain things to her, but Sassy thinks Lula is just jealous, until she follows her one day, taking her daddy with her, and finds Lula making out with Boon. Lula decides to run away from her daddy's anger to find their mama, who isn't dead, as Sassy has been told, but who ran out on them when Sassy was a baby, prompting Daddy to worry that his girls might have some "runaround" in them as well. The plot arc follows a banal, disappointing formula—trashy mom deserts family, daughters turn wild, taciturn daddy holds it all together with help of spinster housekeeper—to a pat conclusion: both girls reluctantly go home with a new understanding of each other, and Sassy learns what real love is through a daddy who silently forgives the women who are bound to disappoint him. Both story and characters are too slight to bear all that weight, however, and Sassy herself never emerges as believable or sympathetic; if anything, her willful misreadings of Boon's attentions evoke cringing pity and head-shaking disbelief—nobody, even in the 1960s, is that obnoxious or naïve. Sidebars purportedly taken from the romance magazines front each chapter and supposedly provide context for Sassy's interpretations of events, but they don't always fit the scenarios. Readers who enjoyed Hemphill's debut Long Gone Daddy (BCCB 6/06) will be sorely disappointed by this slim second helping.