Running

A Novel

By: Cara Hoffman

Narrated by: Kate Handford

Running brings together an ensemble of outsiders who get by as runners - hustlers who sell tourists on low-end accommodations for a small commission and a place to stay. Bridey Sullivan, a young American woman who has fled a peculiar and traumatic upbringing in Washington State, takes up with a queer British couple, the poet Milo Rollack and Eton drop-out Jasper Lethe. Slipping in and out of homelessness, addiction, and under-the-table jobs, they create their own kind of family as they struggle to survive. Whether in the red light district of Athens or the world of fire jumpers in the Pacific Northwest, we are always in a space of gorgeously wrought otherness. Running shows novelist Cara Hoffman to be writing at the peak of her craft.

©2017 Cara Hoffman (P)2017 Dreamscape Media, LLC

Well-written, but I hated everyone in it

Well-written, but I hated everyone in it

One of those books where basically every character is deplorable in one way or another. The book was well-written and well-constructed, and the author, Cara Hoffman‘s, prose is solid…I just hated every one of the characters.

I don’t think I was the proper fan base for this book, as it seems like it would be more for someone who enjoys watching people carwreck their own lives— so people who enjoy reality TV would actually probably really enjoy this book a lot (I hate reality TV, so I am not that audience)!
I thought Cara Hoffman's switching perspectives between the characters was interesting: the woman was in first person, but the man was in third person.

The very ending was cute—ish, as long as you don’t think too hard about how she got there.