title: Stealing Henry
author:  Carolyn MacCullough 
description: Grade 8 Up&ndash;Fed up with her alcoholic stepfather's violent ways and her mother's resignation, Savannah, 17, "brains him" with a frying pan and flees her New Jersey home, taking her 8-year-old half brother with her. They stop first at the apartment of a former boyfriend in New York, then move on to find a great-aunt in Maine whom the teen barely remembers, reversing their mother's path away from her roots. Intertwined with the story of Savannah and Henry's travels is their mother's story: how boredom in her small town and the arrival of an attractive stranger led to an unexpected pregnancy and years of driving around the country with her daughter until she found someone willing to marry a woman with a child. For Savannah, those years alone with her mother are rosy memories. She desperately misses the woman she remembers and hopes that her flight will somehow rekindle her spirit. MacCullough captures the panicky quality of the escape, telling the story obliquely but with intermittent flashes of minute detail. But because so much is implied rather than directly stated, Savannah's desperation is unconvincing. Readers are left with the uneasy feeling that in spite of her determination not to be like her mother, she may be following the same path.<I>&ndash;Kathleen Isaacs, formerly at Edmund Burke School, Washington, DC</I> <BR>Copyright &copy; Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: ![](images/00003.jpg)
  
  THE MANE SQUEEZE
  
  SHELLY LAURENSTON
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  PROLOGUE
  
  As soon as the earrings and shoes came off, he knew it was a brawl.
  
  A brawl he wanted no part of. Especially when he’d been trying to sneak out.
  And one of the hardest things for someone like him to do was sneak anywhere.
  Yet he couldn’t walk away, he couldn’t turn his back.
  
  This was his friend’s wedding, and he wouldn’t let a couple of cats ruin it
  because they couldn’t hold their liquor or their predatory instinct to maul.
  But maybe, just maybe, if he defused this fast enough, he could still make it
  out without being caught. The key was to prevent an audience. No audience, no
  witnesses, and sneaking away could continue.
  
  There. A goal. He liked goals.
  
  And with that goal solidly in mind, Lachlan “Lock” MacRyrie walked through the
  trees surrounding the Long Island, New York, property that held his friend’s
  wedding. He’d never been to a wedding at a castle before but it fit the style
  of the bride, who brough