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News Release | Plaudits | Bios of Mary and Ryan | Media Kit PDF | Book Cover PlauditsWarning: Reading about this off-beat year will stir longings, laughter, and subversive fantasies of life’s possibilities. — Jack Hill, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Homeschooling takes on a whole new meaning when a creative, enterprising mother decides to take her seventeen-year-old son on the road for his junior year of high school. With the world as their classroom, Mary Sennewald and Ryan Costello embarked upon a once-in-a-lifetime journey that makes us less adventurous parents reevaluate the lessons our children are taught in school versus the ones they might learn from the world. Stripped of friends, spouse, siblings, and standardized testing, Mary and Ryan share their experiences in this magnificent account of their odyssey. In so doing, perhaps those of us unable or unwilling to take on such a challenge can benefit from the lessons learned on the road, in the van, and most importantly, between parent and child. This is the stuff Dr. Spock doesn’t teach, but what every parent and child needs to know about the limits of imagination, courage, camaraderie, love, and the fact that our babies don’t stay babies for very long. — Crystal Hubbard, It was Mary Lois Sennewald’s harebrained and inspired idea to take her teenaged son out of high school in Missouri for a year and onto that great teacher of generations—the Open Road. Had she known the perils that awaited—an almost fatal blizzard on the back roads of Canada, and outwardly idyllic Mexican town that would later erupt in riots and death—one suspects she might never have left home. It is her great gift to readers that she did. Here are moments of high drama and low comedy, of countless frustrations and magical epiphanies. This is a book about travel, but it’s much more. It is about mothers and sons, despair and elation, the kindness of strangers and the cruelty of nature. Sennewald felt the lure of the horizon and the relentless pull of home, and on their journey together, she and her son learned things infinite and profound. Read this and you will, too. — Steve Friedman, The Agony of Victory: When Winning Isn’t Enough |
