I consider myself a fairly easy crier—give me a nicely written birthday card or show me an exceptionally wholesome dog food commercial and you know there will be tears on my end. But even with that in mind, I am appalled by the amount of times I cried while reading The Art of Running Away. How dare Sabrina Kleckner deliver a pitch-perfect middle-grade debut that makes me laugh about a Shrek joke one second and cry for ten pages straight.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The Art of Running Away follows Maisie, who loves nothing more than working in her family’s portrait studio Glenna’s Portraits and spending time with her best friend writing The Book,
When her parents send her off to Edinburgh to spend the summer with her aunt so she can find her passions beyond art, no one is more surprised than Maisie when none other than her estranged 22-year-old-brother who ran away from home when she was six shows up at their aunt’s doorstep, offering to whisk Maisie away to London for the summer so the two of them can get reacquainted.
Seeing an opportunity to help out her family’s struggling portrait studio and finally uncovering the reason why her brother left all those years ago, Maisie accepts and suddenly finds herself in a strange town with her closed-off brother. But the more time they spend together, the more Maisie realises that what her parents told her about her brother’s disappearance wasn’t the whole story—and that sometimes, running is the only way to survive.
Not me tearing up just writing that synopsis, nuh-uh.
So, in case you couldn’t tell, The Art of Running Away completely floored me. Kleckner completely nails the voice of twelve-year old Maisie to the point where I could imagine her sitting right beside me, telling me her story. Maisie is such a force of nature in everything she does—the way she wants to bring her own style to her parents’ portrait studio, how she stands up for herself and demands the truth from Calum and even how she realises that friendship goes both ways—meaning that if you don’t put any effort into your friendships, you can’t expect the other side to do the hard work all on their own. Throughout this book, Maisie learns hard truths, understands what it means to be yourself in the world even if or especially when that’s not what others want and somehow finds her own place in the mess of it all—with her family, with her friends, with her big brother.
There are so many layers to this story and that’s artfully shown through relationships. We get to see Maisie’s very differing relationship with her parents—her stubborn mother and her reliant, yet quiet father—from Calum’s relationship with them. Their falling out happens for a reason and though most people can guess at the general idea of why Calum left, I think few to none will guess at the depth and necessity of that choice before Calum reveals all. I still can’t think of those scenes without tearing up because while I love that we get Maisie who’s been told by her parents from day one that love is love, that she can bring home whoever she wants, that Maisie’s best friend is queer and it’s completely accepted by everyone at school, there’s also that underlying dread, that sense of things having changed at some point because it wasn’t always the case. As Maisie slowly realises that just because LGBTQ+ people are accepted in her world now that doesn’t meant they always were, you get to thinking about society wherever you live and how things have changed over the past few decades. The Art of Running Away makes you think not only of privilege but of human rights and just how far we’ve yet to go to have equality for all and to do that in an approachable, engaging manner in a middle-grade? Man alive, Kleckner knows what she’s doing.
There are so many plot points that I want to highlight, like Calum’s roommates in London, a certain Shrek bet that still makes me cackle jus thinking of it and much more, but really, those are things you need the context of the book for, so all I can say is, get your wallets ready—this one’s worth it.
Emotional and immersive, The Art of Running Away breaks your heart as many times as it fixes it. With unforgettable characters, authentic sibling squabbles and a big heart at the centre of it all, Kleckner’s debut is not to be missed!
The Art of Running Away is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of November 16th 2021.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
Twelve-year-old Maisie is an artist. When she’s in front of her sketchbook or apprenticing at Glenna’s Portraits, the family-run art shop her grandmother started, the world makes sense. She doesn’t think about Calum, her brother who mysteriously left home and cut ties with her family six years ago, or her parents’ insistence that she “broaden her horizons” and try something new—something that isn’t art.
But when Glenna’s Portraits falls on hard times, Maisie’s plan to take over the shop when she’s older and become a lifelong artist starts to crumble. In desperation to make things right, Maisie runs away to London to reconnect with her adult brother, hoping he might be the key to saving the shop. But as Maisie learns about her family’s past from Calum, she starts to rethink everything she’s ever known. Maisie must decide not only if saving her family’s art shop is worth it, but if she can forgive her parents for the mistakes they’ve made.
