This is an intriguing novel about a group of outsiders. The characters are well done and Hoffman makes great use of her setting. A very good read.

The non linear storytelling bugged me too much and I had trouble getting into the plot or the characters. Not my cup of tea but I could see others loving it as I know many readers whose brains like stories that jump around in time. Maybe it's an acquired taste.

This book was interesting, to say the least. The premise is what hooked me, and it was that interesting curiosity that held me throughout the book's entirety. A great read for lovers of the 80s.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/art-matters-when-books-can-save-your-life_us_59a95ba2e4b0d0c16bb52451
✪ Running, Cara Hoffman’s gorgeously written story of outcasts who flee the prisons of country and childhood to forge their own original family, bristles with intelligence, melancholy and erotic power. Its tormented but ever-striving characters steal our hearts as they search for safety and communion. Running begs for a film adaptation as harshly beautiful as these pages.

Set in the red-light district of Athens in the 1980s, Running follows a group of teenagers/young adults working as “runners” – they hustle tourists to sell cheap, low-end accommodation, in exchange for a small commission and a place to sleep. Their sales techniques are often aggressive and even dangerous, and the kids barely make enough money to survive in the slums of Athens.

Bridey is an American teenager, working as a runner to escape her traumatic childhood – after the death of her parents when she was ten, Bridey lived with her survivalist uncle, off the grid in the wilderness of Washington state. In Athens, she meets a gay British couple, Milo and Jasper. The two men are intellectuals and poets, and they are both damaged in their own way. Jasper, Milo and Bridey embark on an unusual romantic relationship that is based more on comfort than sex – they create their own intimate family, carving out a home in their ramshackle hotel room, furnished with flea market finds.

All three of the young runners are troubled, but it is Jasper’s spiral into addiction and madness that begins to drive them apart. They get involved with a violent IRA member named Declan, who is running a stolen passport racket, and eventually they are linked to an act of terrorism on a Greek train. Bridey sacrifices everything to clear the names of her friends, and she is forced to disappear from Athens. When she returns, she discovers that everything has changed in shocking ways – Jasper is missing, and Milo is devastated.

The descriptions of the runners’ former lives in Athens are alternated with Milo’s current life in New York. After he lost touch with Bridey, his career as a poet flourished, eventually leading to a job teaching poetry at NYU. Although he has been welcomed into the establishment of the literati, Milo struggles with feeling like an outsider, and he is more at home with the homeless people living in the park. Whether we are in Washington, Athens or New York City, the setting is distinct and atmospheric – I felt completely immersed in the sights, sounds and smells of each location.

The plot was always moving to unexpected places, with surprising twists that remained believable. There is a lot going on in this novel, and it was sometimes difficult to figure out where/when we are in the plot, but it does all come together in a powerful way. The prose is beautiful, and the story is rewarding if you stick with it. The characters’ motives are not always clear at first, but there is an emotional depth in these snapshots of desperate young lives that makes it all worthwhile. I will definitely be looking for more books by Cara Hoffman.

I received this book from Simon & Schuster and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Running by Cara Hoffman
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Release Date: February 21, 2017
Length: 288 pages

Single Sentence Summary: Three teens, “running” in Athens, become embroiled in a scheme that will forever alter their lives.

Primary Characters: Bridey Sullivan– A girl from Washington, raised by her survivalist uncle. Bridey likes being alone and starting fires. Milo Rollack – A high school dropout, turned boxer from Manchester. Milo left with Jasper the night they met. Jasper Lethe – An Eton dropout, on the run and in search of something more. Jasper becomes more and more unstable as the story goes on. The three become their own sort of dysfunctional family.

Synopsis: Bridey meets Jasper and Milo in Athens where they are all “runners” for the same seedy hotel. (Runners are young people who pass out flyers for hotels in larger cities, luring tourists back often in exchange for a paltry commission and a place to stay.) Their frantic, addicted lifestyle leads to them becoming linked to a terrorist attack. Out of necessity, fear, and hopelessness the three part and the narrative moves to the lifelong after effects of those weeks they were together in Athens.

Review: Running is a dark, haunting story woven together in three different time periods. The first, in 1988 Athens, tells the story of Bridey meeting Jasper and Milo and the brief time in which they live together. Jasper finds Bridey on a train he’s “running” and seeing some of himself in her, brings her home to the fleabag hotel where he lives with Milo. It’s a much-needed respite for Bridey, but also a lot more. In Milo and Jasper, Bridey finds companionship, drinking-buddies, lovers and more. Together they weather the violence of Declan, a sometimes runner, often times mercenary, who believes he’s in charge. Jasper, Milo and Bridey share a love of books and reading. The roof top hotel room where they live is littered with books, passed around like candy. Despite everything, Jasper’s instability threatens their delicate balance.

The other two periods follow Bridey and Milo as they live with the results of the first. Just a few months later, Bridey is back in Athens, with a desperate need to know where Jasper and Milo have gone. In twenty years, Milo is a successful poet, with a teaching position in NYC, so why would he still rather sleep on the streets?

In Running, Cara Hoffman did a fabulous job developing her characters, especially Bridey and Milo. She created a background for Bridey that goes a long way to helping the reader understand most (but not all) of the choices she makes.

“Bridey was an American survivor, the kind that made you think of the Donner Party.”

Raised by a survivalist uncle, Bridey is one tough girl! Milo for me was the saddest character of the three. In many ways he had the most going for him, but was trapped in a past that would not release its grip on him. I ached for his sadness.

The horror of having desired that boy could still keep him up at nights…The shame of how deeply Milo had loved and despised him was only beginning in those days on the island.”

I feel like I’ve already given too much away, so I won’t say more about the story, but there is more to say about the book. It’s a book you must pay attention to while reading, but that’s really not hard to do. The chapters are short, moving between the three different times. I liked Hoffman’s characters despite their many flaws. All do things you will not care for, but you will usually be sympathetic. As I said at the beginning of this review, Running is a dark, haunting story, but it is beautifully crafted. I highly recommend it. Grade: B+

Note: I received a copy of this book from the publisher (via NetGalley) in exchange for my honest review.

Thanks Simon & Schuster and netgalley for this ARC.

I felt like I could have been there with this group of kids. It's the type of novel that transports us to a different time.
Loved it!

A powerful book that spoke to me about the exhilaration and danger of living on the edge of engagement and non-engagement, belonging to the world and belonging only to oneself. Three dispossessed young adults come together in Athens, and for a brief moment become entwined. The separate drives that motor their lives never stop running, though, and soon they are cast out onto their individual trajectories.

Running is a strange and ambitious whirlwind of a novel. It tells the story of Bridey Sullivan, a young American woman living on the streets of Athens, who takes up with Jasper and Milo, a British couple living and working in the hotel Olympos. The three work as 'runners,' essentially hustling tourists into staying at their run-down hotel in exchange for commission and a place to stay.

I wasn't sure what to expect from this novel and now, having finished it, I'm not really sure what I got from it. I'm sort of confused and very conflicted.

The best part of this book was the atmosphere. The red light district of 1980s Athens comes to life on the page. Evocative and lyrical, Hoffman's prose complements the insular setting and draws the reader into this world of crime and addiction. The characters, flawed and compelling, all make a strong impression. This is a book about the indelible impressions that relationships leave over time, a motif explored particularly well by the scope of Hoffman's narrative.

Now, onto the bad. I'm not sure what logic (if any?) Running's timeline follows. It's certainly no logic that I recognize. I was constantly confused about when Bridey's narration was taking place, and while I understand that this uncertainty was most likely intentional on the author's part, it really detracted from my ability to get invested in this narrative. Additionally, the switches from Bridey's first-person POV to Milo's third-person are jarring. Maybe it's a matter of opinion, but I personally dislike when first and third person are used in a novel together.

As a disclaimer for this next complaint, I just want to clarify that I am not the sort of reader who requires every facet of a story to be wrapped up in a neat bow. I actually enjoy ambiguous endings more often than not. But I need to feel like that ambiguity serves a purpose other than frustrating the reader, and I didn't really get that here. This isn't just a case of 'do not expect answers' - it goes further and we get into the murky territory of 'do not even be sure which questions you're supposed to be asking of this book.'

The bottom line is that Running needed more. There is so much potential here. A story which promises to be filled to the brim with excitement ends up being rather anemic, and I'm personally left with too many questions to have found this a particularly rewarding reading experience.

If you want a book that's as thought-provoking as it is sultry and atmospheric, look no further. If you want a comprehensive story that examines its themes to their full potential and leaves no stone unturned, skip this one. The problem is, I'm not sure which category I fall into. A tentative 3 stars.

I had no idea that there was such a thing as "running," that hustling tourists into a rundown dive where they confiscate passports and offer no amenities whatsoever could offer one a so-called living. But this is how Eton-educated Jasper, his hulking poet of a boyfriend Milo, and wiry little American orphan Bridey Sullivan earn their scant keep in the bowels of Athens, Greece. The ruinous hotel gives them a room, and they seem to spend all their earnings at the in-house bar, Drinks Time.

I am not a fan of this new literary fad of a device where scenes shift backwards and forwards in time and point of view under the guise of mystery, also I don't like the romanticizing of substance abuse where people who drink, smoke and do drugs are portrayed as being brilliant and beautiful and sexy in between vomiting and being arrested. So attractive that they impregnate one another even though they're homosexual. Or maybe they just think they do. Also unclear is why Declan Joyce, the brutal IRA soldier who abuses Jasper is included in this group, or why Bridey runs, rapes and ruins Murat Christensen, a Dutch anthropology scholar. And why does she hate families so much? Why does everybody talk so incessantly about literature and gossip but not the truth? Despite all these questions, and lack of a hero I wanted to root for, I have to say I still inhaled this book. The writing is gripping. And I love the cover.

Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the ARC. I was not familiar with Cara Hoffman's work and understand this is a departure for her. The book was excellent, but so dark for my tastes. Many unlikeable (or at least hard to like) people, doing things I couldn't imagine and for reasons that were often not entirely made clear. All things I don't like. That said, I would recommend the novel. The writing is evocative and the characters and settings were crystal clear in my mind.