(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

[genarti]

Madam, Will You Talk? by Mary Stewart is very much a romantic suspense novel of its time, but it has a dad as a major character! rot13 for spoilers for much of the book, though they're pretty genre-predictable ones: ur'f gur ybir vagrerfg bs gur znva punenpgre (fur'f n jvqbj, ur'f qvibeprq), naq uvf fba vf geniryvat nebhaq Senapr jvgu uvf zbgure (gur ureb'f rk-jvsr) naq ure ybire. Sbe n fbyvq puhax bs gur obbx vg'f frg hc gb frrz yvxr gur sngure vf n zheqrere naq uvf fba vf greevsvrq bs uvz. Ohg gura vg gheaf bhg gung ur'f flzcngurgvp, gur rk-jvsr naq gur ybire ner zheqreref vafgrnq, naq gur fba vf greevsvrq SBE uvf orybirq sngure engure guna bs uvz.

(Stephen King's The Dark Tower MIGHT count, but it's enough of a maybe in enough directions, as well as being a long series, that I'm not sure about reccing it in this context.)

Ugh, I feel sure I must know others! I'll keep pondering.

[wendelah1]

John Ames in Marilyn Robinson's Gilead. The entire book is about fathers and sons and grandsons, too. It's a wonderful novel, a favorite of President Obama's.

Ashoke Ganguli in The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. It covers his son's life from birth through adulthood.

Charles Ingalls from the Little House books. The kids start out young but it's a long series.

[rosefox]

In Kings of the Wyld, which is basically This Is Spinal Tap in epic fantasy land, one of the major characters sets out to rescue his adult daughter, who, to his dismay, has followed him into the mercenary business. There aren't any significant scenes of father/daughter bonding, but he meets all of your criteria. The protagonist is also a father, but his daughter is younger.

[rushthatspeaks]

Quentin in Diana Wynne Jones' Archer's Goon. Well, they have a younger child too, but otherwise yes.

[schneefink]

Otori Takeo in the sequel, The Harsh Cry of the Heron. A lot of the book is about how he tries to do right by his daughters and especially find a way for the eldest to marry the man she loves. He is... not very successful overall, but he does try. (I should reread that series, it's been a while.)

[mildred_of_midgard]

A String in the Harp! Pushes some of the same buttons for me as the Tillerman series.

[sophia_sol]

The Girl from Everywhere, and its sequel The Ship Beyond Time, by Heidi Heilig, have a major secondary character who's the father of the teenage protagonist and their relationship is an important part of the books.

[melannen]

This is tough! I thought it would be easier too.

-Various King Arthurs?
-Some of Heinlein's self-inserts, but that gets... weird
-Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser start having all their adult-ish illegitimate kids with various one-off women they had seduced in their quests show up in the later stories when they're trying to retire, which is pretty amazing
-Aubrey-Maturin's kids are teens by the time the series ends, iirc

...everything else I'm coming up with, either it's generational sagas where the kids are the MCs by the time they're teenagers (like Damia or Witch World) or it's stuff with a huge ensemble cast that includes parents (like Song of Ice and Fire. Although most of them die in that.) Or it's moms (or NB parents, if Fosyf and Celar count. They probably don't anyway).

[genarti]

Whoops, sorry, I missed the part about older kids -- the boy in Madam, Will You Talk? is 11 or 12, as I recall, and ditto for the Dark Tower books.

[nestra]

Ellis Peters' Inspector Felse mysteries feature his son, who ages from 11 to 20-something through the course of the series, and the healthy parent-child relationship is often examined.

[cahn]

...I am totally there for romantic suspense novels by Mary Stewart with dads. Putting this on my reading list! (Eh, 11 or 12 is close enough :) I just was looking for not-babies/toddlers, since parenting a baby is a much different state of mind than parenting an older child.)

I just read part of the Dark Tower! (so I could read Yuletide fic, lol) -- Sure, that definitely counts! (Boy, talk about fraught parenting, though!)

[ase]

Harry Callahan in Diane Duane's Wizards series gets increasing dad-time through the series. He gets some good screen time in A Wizard Alone and Wizard's Holiday. Warnings for major character death, details on request.

[cahn]

Oh, brilliant! I read The Namesake years ago and it's clearly time to get back to it again. Gilead sounds wonderful and I will definitely be looking that up.

And Charles Ingalls! <3 Forgot about him -- forgot to check my kids' bookshelves as well as mine :)

[cahn]

which is basically This Is Spinal Tap in epic fantasy land

...you had me here. :) (And I don't need father/daughter bonding, really!)

[cahn]

Ha, I didn't mean to exclude younger kids! You know, I haven't actually read Archer's Goon. (I did this weird thing where when she died I stopped reading her books because I didn't want to run out, which... I should start again.) That also reminds me that Wizard Derk from Dark Lord of Derkholm also qualifies!

[cahn]

Huh, this sounds very interesting. I will have to look this up!

[cahn]

...I remember I read this fairly young, and thought it was okay, which is almost certainly what I would have thought if I'd read the Tillerman series before I was an adult. I am going to have to look at this one again.

[cahn]

Whoa, I don't even know about these books! That sounds great! *puts on list*

[cahn]

(lol at your Heinlein comment!)

You know, it's sort of interesting how few present dads there are in Arthurian mythos, really, given how many guys are riding around (well, maybe the problem is that they're all riding around all the time). Sir Ector in Sword in the Stone is the only one I can really think of -- Arthur doesn't have a father around, the Orkney boys maybe had King Lot for a while, I guess?? (although my opinions on this are highly colored by T.H. White) Mordred definitely didn't have his father around, Lancelot ran off from Galahad... a bunch of deadbeat dads, here!

...I have only read like one or two Fafhrd-Grey-Mouser stories, and clearly I need to read more of these, because that sounds awesome.

Hm, I should do a similar post asking for mom/NB-parent recs, because honestly I had even more trouble coming up with moms on our bookshelf, although that... might partially be a problem with our bookshelf, because like you say there should be things like Damia and such that we don't happen to own right now. Also there seem to be a lot of dead moms out there.

(Although... I'm not sure Fosyf and Celar make my cut of not-crap parents, which is obviously super highly subjective given that Van Hohenheim made it.)

[cahn]

Huh, this sounds very cool, I will have to check this out!

[cahn]

Ah! I have read Wizard's Holiday, but I don't think I actually did read Wizard Alone (and I know I've missed some of the later ones) -- I definitely need to go back and read, thanks!

[sophia_sol]

Yay! I really loved these books, I hope you like them too!

[rosefox]

The author took "What if 'getting the band back together' referred to a band of adventurers?" and dialed it, well, up to 11. It is extremely fun and I recommend it highly.

[wendelah1]

I thought of another character, if you aren't excluding books with younger children, too. In Kim Stanley Robinson's Science in the Capital trilogy, Charlie Quibler is a mostly stay-at-home father, who works part time for a senator. His wife is a scientist at NSF and they have two children, one toddler, and one eleven-year-old. Charlie is a wonderful father. In 2015, he revised and cut 300 pages from the three novels and republished them as Green Earth, which I haven't read.

[mildred_of_midgard]

It's not as all-around awesome as the Tillermans, but it falls in the same category of family bonding that I reread endlessly for comfort reading.

Patrick Bronte in Dark Quartet is the most major character after the Bronte siblings--we even get his POV a few times--and the focus is on him as loving, non-abusive parent who sometimes makes mistakes. Dark Quartet is one of my all-time favorite books and highly recommended.

If you're a Star Trek fan (or this is a rec list for someone who is), Star Trek: Best Destiny requires familiarity with canon, but the focus is on George Kirk as father of teenage James Kirk. It's not one of my all-time favorites, but I do like it and own it.