Running Toward Home

ISBN 13: 978-1-897126-01-1
224 pages, paperback
Fall 2006

Fiction | Fictionistas | Nunatak

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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 make their home his for life, 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 protection and standing in the way of life lessons. For twenty-four hours the Calgary Zoo becomes the entire world, and the lines between the nurturing instincts in animals and humans become blurred.

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“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. . . . Betty Jane Hegerat has written a small gem of a novel.”
—Dave Margoshes, We Who Seek

“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, Whipstock