(no subject)

[cahn]

Please rec me books with dads who are major characters (important secondary character is fine) and for whom parenting is an important component of their character, with kids who are older at the time of canon (teenager or above). They don't need to be good parents, necessarily, and they can make horrible mistakes, but they should be (relatively?) non-abusive and clearly love their kid(s).

So far I've got

-Aral Vorkosigan (...I guess he's not super a main character any more, but he casts a pretty long shadow)
-Atticus Finch
-Andrew Wiggin
-Jean Valjean
-Reb Saunders and David Malter
-Van Hohenheim (taking the prize for not being a good parent and making horrible mistakes...)

...this is a much lower percentage of the books we own than I had thought it would be!

Comments

[skygiants]

In addition to the DWJs, here are a few others I can think of:

- Sholem Aleichem's collected Tevye stories, which Fiddler on the Roof was based on, are all about Tevye The Distressed Dad Of Five Teen Daughters
- the father of the teen protagonist in Angie Thomas' The Hate U Give is an important, present, and positive character
- Laurence Yep's Dragon's Gate is about a Chinese teen and his dad and uncle coming to America to work on the railroad (...in order to gain important revolutionary railroad skills!)
- Leigh Bardugo's Six of Crows is about hard-edged teen criminals! no parents in sight!! but then in the sequel Crooked Kingdom it turns out one of them has an incredibly sweet dad who turns up and takes charge of the whole lot and it's amazing
- Kate Elliott's Court of Fives trilogy spends a lot of page-space on the mixed-race heroine's complicated relationship with her father, who is doing his best to protect his family and messing up most of the time
- oh hey, does Daimbert count? I'm not sure how major a character he actually is in the Antonia books...
- this isn't actually out yet, but Courtney Milan got so taken by the dynamic between the protag and his dad in her romance novel Trade Me that she's now apparently writing him a three-volume novel of his very own

I'm sure there are more on my shelves I'm not thinking of now, so STAY TUNED

[cahn]

Ahhhh, Tevye! I forgot about him, how could I forget about him??

ok, these all sound great! Trade Me is one where I read the Kindle sample and was like, this is awesome, but then I never got around to buying it, I'd better rectify that

of course Daimbert counts WAIT HOLD ON WHAT IS THIS ABOUT ANTONIA BOOKS HOW DID I NOT KNOW ABOUT THESE!!!!

[skygiants]

It's a duology about TEEN ANTONIA LEARNING MAGIC! I've only read the one yet, the other's on my Kindle and I've been saving it. :D