A Love Like No Other: The Good Father by Noah Hawley
Among the perks of working at Lemuria is the opportunity to read advanced reading copies (or in the trade jargon ARCs) of an upcoming book. Into my hands fell The Good Father by Noah Hawley just out last week. Now, this is not your feel good book about parenting and unconditional love.
Imagine an ordinary evening home with your family when you hear a fast-breaking story on the television news about a senator, probably the next presidential candidate, who has been shot in Los Angeles. Oh dreadful. But then you hear your eldest son’s name as the accused shooter.
Your life is changed forever. Nothing will ever be the same again. The repercussions are unfathomable.
So it is with Dr. Paul Allen, chief of rheumatology at Columbia Presbyterian. Denial, fear, grief overtake him. After visiting the boy in prison and finding him uncommunicative, not even to claim his guilt or innocence, Dr. Allen is driven to find the truth.
Daniel Allen, 19, drops out of Vassar and takes to the road. He finds a job with loving, caring people in Iowa where he works for a few months, learns a lot about guns then wanderlust pushes him onward. He lands in Texas and works for the senator who he is later accused of shooting. He seems unable to last more than four months in any one place. Helena, Portland, San Francisco, Sacramento and finally Los Angeles.
The novel is written from two perspectives-the father and the son. The father conducts an investigation into himself and into the circumstances as he does in his practice-look beyond the obvious, gather all the information possible.
Daniel eventually changes his name to Carter Allen Cash. He is spending an inordinate amount of time alone. He is searching, too. He realizes what he must do.
All parents wonder when a crisis occurs, if they had done this or that differently would the outcome be the same. A parent’s love for a child is like no other. When do you let go?
The setting first takes us to Pontiac County, Quebec, around 1900 where Irish famine farmers and French Canadians had settled along the St. Lawrence River and eventually moved into the hinterlands of Quebec, hoping to farm and cut more trees.
Joe’s father, in reckless pursuit of adventure, had died in South Africa. Joe, being the oldest, becomes the automatic head of the household, confident, strong and stocky until the mother remarries a ne’er do well whose only claim to fame is as an obsessive fiddler whose wretched behavior towards his step children will lead them to a necessary act of kidnapping where the kids do the napping and the adult is the one literally kicked out of town.
It’s a beautiful story, a big sweep through history and the dynamics of a troubled family. Yet, there is a strength and beauty in this imperfect relationship bolstered by the physical landscape at both ends of our country. The land and the people dance together and they retreat like boxers in a ring, often coming out fighting, victors not always clear.
she tries to help a friend at prom with a love spell that goes horribly wrong. Her dad sentences her to Hecate Hall (fondly nicknamed Hex Hall), a school for witches, shapeshifters, and fairies who have threatened their kind by showing their magic to humans. Bored and angry, she is determined not to like Hex Hall, but everything is not as it seems at Hex Hall, or in Sophie’s life.
