Father’s Day is coming! How about some books to celebrate dads?
Many of the characters in my books are or were street kids and/or foster kids and they tend to have abusive or absent fathers. So I thought I would highlight a couple of them who had good relationships with their dads. I have also pulled together a sampling of other books showcasing good father/child relationships. I hope you find something here that you like!
Making Her Mark
Secrets and lies.
When everything changed, Kelli thought she would be happy. But nothing really changed.
Kelli’s life has never been easy. She’s always faced her problems head on. She’s strong and savvy and in charge of herself. All of that is about to change.
Her life is turned upside down when she discovers the secret that her mother has been hiding from her for years.
Kelli thinks this is her one chance at happiness. But is it?
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️One of the best books I’ve read in a long time!
By the author of Tattooed Teardrops, winner of the Top Fiction Award, In the Margins Committee, 2016, Kelli’s journey of discovery about herself and her family will keep you turning the pages.
If you enjoy gritty contemporary young adult books like those by John Green and Stephen Chbosky, give P.D. Workman’s Making Her Mark a try.
I cheered for Kellie, hoping she would find the love and validation she always lacked and would finally find peace within herself. If you’ve never tried PD Workman’s novels, then I recommend you do. If you’re already a fan, you won’t be disappointed with this story.
—Victoria, Goodreads reader
Virtually Harmless
From award-winning and USA Today Bestselling Author, P.D. Workman
Micah lived a quiet, comfortable life, her involvement in law enforcement limited to the composite pictures that she produced with her computer and colored pencils.
But everything is turned upside down when she involves herself in the case of an infant found abandoned in the Sweetgrass Hills.
With the help of her knowledge of DNA and law enforcement contacts across the country, Micah is closing in on a killer. But her investigation draws the killer’s attention, and she finds herself in the middle of an operation that could mean the end of her career—or worse, her life.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ This cosy thriller with a neurodivergent, aro-ace MC will keep you turning the pages long after you should have logged into your day job. Oops.
Love CSI and other forensic mysteries? Award-winning and USA Today bestselling author brings you this fresh new nail-biter for your next read.
Join Micah as she picks up her pencils and starts on a new case.
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“P. D. Workman has outdone herself with this riveting techno-thriller featuring Micah Miller, a forensic artist specializing in composite renderings based on forensic DNA phenotyping … This book offers plenty of thrills, chills, suspense and white-knuckled tension as the plot unfolds and it kept me turning pages until late into the night. The story is clean and well-written, the plot is fascinating, the pace is relentless and the characters are realistic and relatable. I highly recommend this absorbing and thoroughly enjoyable thriller to anyone who favors CSI, NCIS, Cold Case, Forensic Files or any high-tech inspired crime-solving theme.”
—Kim, Goodreads reviewer
I thought I would include a couple of special mentions as well:
- While Zachary Goldman came from an abusive and negligent family and dealt with a variety of other homes throughout his formative years, one foster father, Mr. Peterson, kept in touch with him over the years, helping him with his photography and providing emotional support. His partner, Pat Parker, has also been a positive father figure for Zachary in the years that he and Mr. Peterson have been together. Both Lorne and Pat get plenty of coverage in Zachary Goldman Mysteries and in the upcoming books in the Kenzie Kirsch Medical Thriller series.
- In Those Who Believe, Nathan’s father re-establishes contact with him.
- While Vanna’s father has passed away before the action in Pursued by the Past, Vanna clearly misses him and the role that he played in their family.
And more!
Here are a few more I have gathered together for you.
The Mesilla
At 14 years old, Jesus ‘Chuy’ Perez Contreras Verazzi Messi is too small and frail to work the land on the family farm near the Rio Bravo in Mexico. The local padre’s tutoring reveals Jesus’s unending curiosity and fertile mind. Noted Las Cruces, New Mexico attorney and politician, Colonel Albert Jennings Fountain agrees to take his nephew, under his wing. Jesus ‘reads law’ with his uncle and shares adventures and adversity with the Fountains and other historic Mesilla and Tularosa Valley citizens.
His coming of age story will take you into the wild southwest, a brewing range war, a territory struggling toward statehood, courtroom dramas, and the adventures and adversities of a boy’s quest for manhood.
*A fictional memoir by Jesus about the ten years leading to the notorious and unsolved Fountain murders.
The Witches of Crannock Dale
When an enemy army threatens eleven-year old Mara’s home, she makes up her mind to save her family, one way or another. But when the knights protecting her village arrest her favorite aunt for witchcraft, she discovers that the difference between friend and foe may not be as obvious as she once thought.
This is a story of war and espionage, set in a low fantasy world. It is also about a child getting to know her mother and father in a new way.
Nowhere Boulevard
Stephen Bell wants to be forgiven for reading his daughter’s diary. But he’s compelled to dredge every secret as her world changes.
This is the story of how Sarah’s perfect existence is shattered when everything trusted is stolen from her. Dad’s quit his job. Mum’s got pregnant and gone mental. But the boyfriend is a welcome distraction…until crazy is dialled to the max.
Sarah tries to be normal among her peers — but normal won’t let her be.
In a change from Black’s usual style, she breathes life into a family at breaking point. But readers will be left with no doubt that this is Katherine Black at her psychological best.
In her trademark signature of getting into the darkest corners of the psyche, she takes them one step closer to the very brink of dancing with the crazies.
This is no Disneyland. This is Nowhere Boulevard…
A Wrinkle in Time
It was a dark and stormy night; Meg Murry, her small brother Charles Wallace, and her mother had come down to the kitchen for a midnight snack when they were upset by the arrival of a most disturbing stranger.
“Wild nights are my glory,” the unearthly stranger told them. “I just got caught in a downdraft and blown off course. Let me sit down for a moment, and then I’ll be on my way. Speaking of ways, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract.”
A tesseract (in case the reader doesn’t know) is a wrinkle in time. To tell more would rob the reader of the enjoyment of Miss L’Engle’s unusual book. A Wrinkle in Time, winner of the Newbery Medal in 1963, is the story of the adventures in space and time of Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin O’Keefe (athlete, student, and one of the most popular boys in high school). They are in search of Meg’s father, a scientist who disappeared while engaged in secret work for the government on the tesseract problem.
Beautiful Boy
I’ll warn you ahead this one is a gut-wrenching true story.
What had happened to my beautiful boy? To our family? What did I do wrong?
Those are the wrenching questions that haunted David Sheff’s journey through his son Nic’s addiction to drugs and tentative steps toward recovery. Before Nic became addicted to crystal meth, he was a charming boy, joyous and funny, a varsity athlete and honor student adored by his two younger siblings. After meth, he was a trembling wraith who lied, stole, and lived on the streets.
David Sheff traces the first warning signs: the denial, the three a.m. phone calls—is it Nic? the police? the hospital? His preoccupation with Nic became an addiction in itself.
But as a journalist, he instinctively researched every treatment that might save his son. And he refused to give up on Nic.
Between the World and Me
In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?
Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.
Last Night in Twisted River
In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable’s girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County—to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto—pursued by the implacable constable.
Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them. In a story spanning five decades, Last Night in Twisted River depicts the recent half-century in the United States as “a living replica of Coos County, where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course.” What further distinguishes Last Night in Twisted River is the author’s unmistakable voice—the inimitable voice of an accomplished storyteller.
