Dads and a Debut
Readings for Father’s Day
What makes a book compelling? Join me in reading good books and honing the craft of writing.
Here are some offerings for Father’s Day, some short, some long.
First the short:
Jane Ratcliffe wrote a moving piece, Father Knows Best, about her dad coming to her aid as an adult when she needed it most.
While not about his father, David Perry's heartfelt piece, She Was My First Real Hero, about his grandmother is too good to pass over. After all, one way to look at Father’s Day is as a tribute to our ancestry.
For longer reads, we look at two novels dealing with deeply flawed patricians. Can such fathers, imperfect as they are, leave lasting impressions to help their kids navigate the troubles of life?
Daniel Kraus' novel Whalefall takes us scuba diving in Monterrey Bay, California, a picturesque place of fishing trawlers with mountains in the background. Kraus pays homage to Cannery Row, John Steinbeck’s masterpiece of friends trying to help friends in meager circumstances during the Depression, only for it to go all wrong.
Whalefall is necessarily interior as Jay Gardiner dives solo into the kelp and near the canyons of the Bay. Krause uses frequent flashbacks to provide character interaction and fill us in on Jay’s rocky relationship with his father, who appears to have PTSD of some nature. His father is the reason Jay embarks on the dive. And why Jay runs into trouble, beginning with seeing stars:
Right in front of Jay, one wheel of stars flattens into the shape of a lash. A second wheel does the same. A third, a fourth, every star cluster now an interstellar highway.
This is no hallucination, no underwater UFO.
These are the bioluminescent lights of Architeuthis.
The giant squid.
Kraus makes the story believable. Jay has nothing to fear from the squid because squid don’t eat people. Neither do sperm whales, but whales eat squid, which is how Jay’s story turns into a modern-day Jonah and the whale:
Teeth are all Jay has to grab onto. He takes one on each hand. Thick as bottles but greased with ocean sludge and squid mucus, he can’t hold on . . .
Jay has only 2300 psi of air left in his tank and the hard-earned life lessons taught by his father to survive.
Kate Brody's debut novel Rabbit Hole takes us to Maine for a dark psychological mystery.
Ten years to the day after my sister’s disappearance, my father kills himself. It’s a sleepy Friday night like any other when he drives his car through the rotting barn wall of the most beautiful bridge in town and plunges into the shallow waters below. The same shallow waters where divers in seal suits panned for Angie’s remains when all of our better leads ran cold. He doesn’t vanish like she did…
It will all come later. Things take time.
The narrator is Theodora, “Teddy”. She and her mother deal with the fallout of her father’s death. She discovers he was obsessed with finding Angie and this leads her to Bill, the hunky guy who used to cut their grass, and Mickey, a teen who helped Teddy’s father research Angie’s disappearance. Teddy finds herself pulled down the same rabbit hole that took her father.
Will she follow or will she escape?
Looking down the family tree, Ratcliffe’s and Perry’s true stories inspire me to continue to be a strong presence in my family’s life. There are special bonds between daughters and dads.
Gazing above into the branches, I know my own father wasn’t perfect; whose is? But, after reading these novels, he was saintly. Such is the power of the novel, to appreciate what we’ve long taken for granted.
All the Best,
Geoff
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