(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

[mildred_of_midgard]

Oh, and if father *figures* are okay, Assassin's Apprentice has an orphaned main character who ends up being looked after by this guy who wasn't really looking for a kid but is doing the best he can, and there's a pretty heavy emphasis on the surrogate father part. The rest of the author's books are pretty uneven, but Assassin's Apprentice is my favorite.

A Summer to Die (spoiler in the title: major character death) is a great book about a family consisting of mother, father, and two teenage daughters, but the parents are maybe a little less present than in some of the other examples? They're also fairly somewhat lacking in dimension, but definitely present, significant, and loving.

Scrolling through my Kindle for the umpteenth time today, I just remembered that two of the three major characters in Neal Stephenson's Interface are father and daughter, and the book is in large part about their relationship. Since the daughter is already a neurologist by page 1, it's less about his parenting and more about the relationship between father and daughter as adults, but maybe it counts? It is definitely my favorite Neal Stephenson book, and the only one with good characterization (I attribute that to the fact that there's a co-author listed).

I keep seeing Searching for Bobby Fischer in my Kindle list and reflecting that I wasn't a big fan of the book (which is non-fiction), but I loved the movie. (And I say this as someone who almost never watches movies and even more rarely likes them.) The kid is maybe a bit younger than you're looking for, seven, but he's a chess prodigy, and a major theme of the movie is the father's dilemmas about how to do a good job parenting a chess prodigy, so maybe that's different enough from your standard "raise seven-year-old" fathering skills to be interesting.

[cahn]

Yep yep, father figures are great! Hmm, my brain cut off when you said Neal Stephenson, but if it actually has decent characterization... :)

[mildred_of_midgard]

I'm not recommending it as one of the best books I've ever read, but it's definitely got a central father-daughter dynamic, and the characterization is competent (imo), uniquely among his books.