Run Away with Me
by Brian Selznick; illus. by the author
High School    Scholastic    320 pp.
4/25    9781339035529    $24.99
e-book ed.  9781546110224    $24.99

Selznick’s first young adult work is imbued with romance and mystery, bookended with long, cinematic passages of textural, wordless, black-and-white illustrations in his signature style. A sixteen-year-old American transplanted to Rome for the summer of 1986 meets an enigmatic Italian teenager via a “speaking statue” and mutual admiration for obelisks—in particular, Bernini’s Elephant and Obelisk. Known for most of the book only by the names they bestow on each other, “Danny” and “Angelo” are quickly swept into a relationship built on devotion, risk-taking, and mythmaking—inspired by the ancient city itself. A sprawling narrative through line seemingly conjured by Angelo details the tragic romance between the elephant obelisk’s true sculptor and his sea-loving partner. This story is bolstered by several other tales of gay love unearthed by Danny and Angelo, some revelatory in nature. Yet Danny’s reluctance to reveal his relationship to his paleographer mother creates a shadow of tension matched only by the young lovers’ awareness of their inevitable separation at summer’s end. In sensitively written first-person past tense (with occasional yearning passages told from a years-later perspective), Selznick builds thematic layer upon layer through poetic language, references to real-world art, and detailed imagery. Readers are guided expertly through a unified narrative and, along with Danny, toward a belief that art, history, and ancestors are evidence “that miracles could happen, and that love could blossom in the midst of impossible odds, even when people didn’t want you to exist.”

From the May/June 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.