Leaving Home: Stories

Leaving home for the first time is a rite of passage. Fifteen of the most respected authors of our time contribute their perspectives to this masterfully crafted anthology. From fear to desire, joy and hope, the mixed emotions that accompany each journey--physical and metaphysical--are conveyed in a manner that both stimulates the mind and satisfies the heart.

Everyone eventually goes on a journey.

"I remember packing a suitcase and carrying it out to the kitchen, standing very still for a few minutes, looking carefully at the familiar objects all around me. The old chrome toaster, the telephone, the pink and white Formica on the kitchen counters. The room was full of bright sunshine. Everything sparkled. My house, I thought. My life. I'm not sure how long I stood there, but later I scribbled out a short note to my parents."
What I said, exactly, I don't recall now. Something vague. Taking off, will call, love Tim."
--from On the Rainy River by Tim O'Brien

You leave home and undergo trails and rites.

"The minute I walked in and the Big Bozo introduced us, I got sick to my stomach. It was one thing to be taken out of your own bed early in the morning--it was something else to be stuck in a strange place with a girl form a whole other race."
-- from "Recitatif" by Toni Morrison

You come back form the journey transformed.

"I felt growing light, I rose up into the air and flew out the window. Higher and higher, above the alley, over the tops of tiles roofs, where I was gathered up by the wind and pushed up toward the night sky until everything below me disappeared and I was alone."
-- from Rules of the Game by Amy Tan

We leave home to find home.Here is an unusual collection of short stories, from a variety of distinguished writers from different cultures and different viewpoints, that explores the turning point in every adolescent’s life when he or she is forced to take that first step away from home, family, and the known. From personal tales of unwed mothers, arranged marriages, and divorcing parents, to stories about refugees and war resistance, Leaving Home paints a canvas of universal experience for teen-age readers, and includes stories by Tim Wynne-Jones, Sandra Cisneros, Gary Soto, and many others.

Hazel Rochman is an assistant editor at ALA Booklist, where she reviews books for children and young adults. Her previous book for HarperCollins, Somehow Tenderness Survives: Stories of Southern Africa, was listed as a 1988 Best Book for Young Adults (ALA) and as a 1989 Book for the Teen Age (NY Public Library). Darlene Z. Campbell is an English teacher at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. Both Ms. Campbell and Ms. Rochman live in Chicago.