Away to Stay

Weary of rundown motels and long nights sleeping in her mother's truck, Olya wants nothing more than to find a home. It seems she might finally find one with Jack, her mother's cousin who lives in a tumbledown ranch in Southern California's Inland Empire. But safety is not all that it seems, and, even here, with a roof over her head and four walls to surround her, Olya is confronted with... Away to Stay burns with the urgency of its young narrator, living at the hard edge of homelessness. Through Olya's off-beat and probing consciousness, we witness a world of desperate people flailing inside a broken system. Olya's mother Irina is a Russian émigré and self-serving liar, obsessed with becoming a prima ballerina and stalking Mikhail Baryshnikov. Cousin Jack is haunted by demons from the Afghanistan war--and the oft-absent Irina. Jack turns his obsession onto his untrainable dog named Bird that he kidnapped from the Riverside Police Department. To Olya, Bird is Job on four legs. Away to Stay is an exploration of the precarity of shelter and home in the life of an immigrant and American working family.