If it wasn’t already clear from the PT Cruiser, it is 2007, one of the last gasps of an era before hyper-connectivity was the norm. Set in the present, such a story may not have warranted unscheduled, in-person confrontations, and the road trip could have been replaced with a Zoom conference. It wasn’t all that long ago when human connection was more reliant upon, well, human connection.

Their journey takes them first to Oklahoma and then to Texas, where their half sister, Pepper, is competing in a college basketball tournament. With her in the back seat they head to Utah for 11-year-old Theron, a fifth grader and budding filmmaker who joins the unlikely trio with little protestation from his mother.

If the ease with which Rube is able to persuade his siblings to join him raises eyebrows, the journey is otherwise so swift and delightful that the story never collapses under the weight of implausibility. It is a pleasure to watch Rube, Mad, Pep and Theron discover everything they have in common — with one another and with the versions of their father that each child got to know — as the odometer rolls up and up. Rube became a mystery novelist, as his father had been when he was a child. Mad is a farmer, as her father had been when she knew him. The reader wonders if their mutual faith in hideous cars driven by strangers isn’t a contrivance at all, but a familial trait.

Of the siblings’ many mishaps, the most poetic occurs when they’re forced to swap rental cars after an accident. Whatever glimmer of hope they have that the new vehicle will be something more exciting than the PT Cruiser is dashed when the agent delivers a similarly hideous Chevrolet HHR. Their father has spent a lifetime driving off from family after family; and here they are, bound together in a revolving door of ugly cars designed for America’s large, nuclear families. The agent presents the option as — what else? — an upgrade.

“Run for the Hills” is a touching and generous romp of a novel, a sort of lighthearted family heist in which the anticipated grift is simply a meeting (or confrontation?) with the characters’ father. The results of their quest are, frankly, beside the point. In bringing the siblings together — with or without the man who helped create them — Wilson makes a bold and convincing case that every real family is one you have to find and, at some point, choose, even if it’s the one you’re born into.