Short Synopsis
From Peter Andreas, the adventure tale and intimate true story of a boy on the run with his mother, a housewife turned radical who kidnapped her son and set off for South America in search of the revolution.

Full Synopsis
Carol Andreas was a traditional 1950s housewife from a small Mennonite town in central Kansas who became a radical feminist and Marxist revolutionary. From the late sixties to the early eighties, she went through multiple husbands and countless lovers while living in three states and five countries. She took her youngest son, Peter, with her wherever she went, even kidnapping him and running off to South America after his straitlaced father won a long and bitter custody fight.

They were chasing the revolution together, though the more they chased it the more distant it became. They battled the bad "isms" (sexism, imperialism, capitalism, fascism, consumerism), and fought for the good "isms" (feminism, socialism, communism, egalitarianism). They were constantly running, moving, hiding. Between the ages of five and eleven, Peter attended more than a dozen schools and lived in more than a dozen homes, moving from the suburbs of Detroit to a hippie commune in Berkeley to a socialist collective farm in Chile to highland villages and coastal shantytowns in Peru. When they secretly returned to America they settled down clandestinely in Denver, where his mother changed her name to hide from his father.

"Caught between parents, cultures and ideologies, Andreas’s thoroughly engrossing account of his conflicted upbringing is enriched by excerpts from his mother’s diaries, offering glimpses into the mind of a woman so driven by a desire for social equality that her actions call into question what constitutes quality parenting." ---New York Times

"Those who enjoyed Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle will find much to admire here. . . . This is both a story of a mother and son's fierce devotion to one another, and a fascinating portrait of a woman's life spent committed to radical ideas and politics, and how this affected her closest ally and confidant." ---Booklist Starred Review

"Andreas's exuberant but clear-eyed memoir paints an indelible portrait of his charismatic mother, the era's expansive pursuit of freedom and idealistic commitment, and the toll of exhausted dreams and frayed relationships the idealists left behind." ---Publishers Weekly Starred Review

"A profound and enlightening book that will open readers up to different ideas about love, acceptance, and the bond between mother and son." ---Library Journal Starred Review

Booklist Review

Publishers Weekly Review

Library Journal Review