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Love, Dad
A young woman leaves home during the turbulent early '70s seeking freedom and self-expression yet, on her return, she cannot accept her father's pursuit of self-fulfillment through his divorce and remarriage
- GenresFiction
Paperback
First published January 1, 1981
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About the author
Evan Hunter
189 books115 followersBetter known by his pseudonym Ed McBain.
Born Salvatore Albert Lombino, he legally adopted the name Evan Hunter in 1952. While successful and well known as Evan Hunter, he was even better known as Ed McBain, a name he used for most of his crime fiction, beginning in 1956.
Born Salvatore Albert Lombino, he legally adopted the name Evan Hunter in 1952. While successful and well known as Evan Hunter, he was even better known as Ed McBain, a name he used for most of his crime fiction, beginning in 1956.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
January 20, 2016
An interesting story of 1968-1971 and then a short update in 1979. Mostly set in a fictional CT town named Rutledge and New York City. It is the story of hippie Lissie and her Dad. Lissie is experiencing private prep school, Woodstock, travels across the country and continents while dealing with her family’s idea that she should get a college education. Her father is dealing with his own mid-life crisis and attraction to a woman not much older than his daughter. A lot of the story is told in the format of letters between Lissie and her Dad.
I think this story was a good portrait of the late 1960’s and gave good insight to the teen and parent’s roles and expectations and finding oneself. Throughout the story, I just couldn’t like Lissie. She was very spoiled and only thought of herself. I understand for awhile she had a drug problem, but she just didn't care about anyone else. Even at the end after she cleaned up her wild ways and married the not so cute boy, she was rude to her father.
I think this story was a good portrait of the late 1960’s and gave good insight to the teen and parent’s roles and expectations and finding oneself. Throughout the story, I just couldn’t like Lissie. She was very spoiled and only thought of herself. I understand for awhile she had a drug problem, but she just didn't care about anyone else. Even at the end after she cleaned up her wild ways and married the not so cute boy, she was rude to her father.
July 15, 2020
Love, Dad by Evan Hunter
This is a novel about The Generation Gap, that difference in cultural and political perspective between parents born in the 1920s and 30s who had been through The Great Depression and WWII, and their baby boomer children. It was written in 1981 and looks back 10 or 15 years earlier when the Vietnam war was raging and the activist and hippie generation of young people were trying to move things in a new direction.
It turns out that the characters in this novel correspond with my own family somewhat. It is about a girl, 18, 19 and her parents. The girl was born in late 1951, as I was. Her mother was 19 when she was born. Mine was 19 as well. My dad was 20 but the father in the novel was a few years older than that. Also these are East Coast NYC people and the dad went to Yale. My parents were working class and my dad a high school drop out. Still there are things about the story and the times that evoke that time in my own life.
The novel got me thinking about those times and the nature of The Generation Gap. What was the cause of all that? I don’t have any children so I don’t live with whatever generational differences exist today but I have a feeling that they are in not close to the generational alienation of those times in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
I look back now on the times rather blamelessly. I think we were all partially influenced by the power of corporate mass media marketing that used division as a way to sell. We were told that “our music” was new and exciting with no need to even look back at the old. We were alienated from our parents as a method of selling us stuff. Not only that, but mass media technology changed so rapidly in the 20th Century that the stuff from my parent’s time looked remote, distant, and old. By the time of the 1950 and 60 the technology was rather solid so that now children can look back 40 years into their parent’s childhood times without the technology itself presenting a sort of barrier. A child born in 1950 was only a little over 20 years away from the silent movie era.
The Vietnam War was something else with the USA changing from primarily defensive, arguably, in WWII, to a kind of imperialistic entity which it remains militarily. All the adults back then had been through WWII in one way of another, at home, or over there. My father was too young to be in WWII and watched it all as a growing boy in newsreels and Hollywood propaganda features all designed to support the seemingly noble effort to defeat the Axis enemy. This made a big impression on that generation, and that was largely transposed to support of the Vietnam War, the war my generation was being asked, well, with the draft in effect, demanded to participate in. We naturally saw it quite differently.
Not universally, after all many were called up, went and remained proud USA military people. These are the old men we sometimes see now with the Vietnam Veteran caps on their heads at the grocery store, or doctors office. The point is many people my age were unaffected or in reaction to the anti-war and hippie movements. The baby boomers were not ALL in the hippie and anti-war movements, rather only a large minority no matter the crowds in the Woodstock movie.
In this novel the 18/19 year old daughter character Melissa becomes a sort of international on-the-road hippie, hitching through Europe and on to India with a boy friend, a man she has run into on the road and takes up with after a questionable encounter. Dad is a 43 year old NYC professional photographer for like Time and Life, etc. Mom is 37 and works with challenged children. Before her pregnancy she wanted to be an actress, but Melissa came along when she was only 19. There is a hint of resentment in the mother for this early motherhood she was unprepared for. I think there was in my mother at well, whatever her youthful dreams were, dreams that were never shared with me if they existed at all.
They try to be permissive and patient with their daughter, but she keeps being harder to deal with when she takes off to Europe without even telling them. She has no apparent call to be mean. She was not a victim of any kind of abuse. She gets into some trouble in boarding school that seems to start her alienation and rebellion, she was at a party where some other kids were using pot, she didn’t, and was punished by being confined to campus at the school for a few weekends. Melissa is an only child and there is a feeling that she is a bit spoiled in that she gets what she wants. She eventually just does what she wants and reports back to her parents later.
The family drama goes on, the parents have trouble between themselves as mine did. The Generation Gap effected different classes but in some of the very same ways. It effected my family, me, and these characters who were far more wealthy professional class people.
I enjoy Evan Hunter’s novels and this one did not disappoint. It presents a lucid and entertaining picture of what The Generation Gap was to one family and likely many others.
This is a novel about The Generation Gap, that difference in cultural and political perspective between parents born in the 1920s and 30s who had been through The Great Depression and WWII, and their baby boomer children. It was written in 1981 and looks back 10 or 15 years earlier when the Vietnam war was raging and the activist and hippie generation of young people were trying to move things in a new direction.
It turns out that the characters in this novel correspond with my own family somewhat. It is about a girl, 18, 19 and her parents. The girl was born in late 1951, as I was. Her mother was 19 when she was born. Mine was 19 as well. My dad was 20 but the father in the novel was a few years older than that. Also these are East Coast NYC people and the dad went to Yale. My parents were working class and my dad a high school drop out. Still there are things about the story and the times that evoke that time in my own life.
The novel got me thinking about those times and the nature of The Generation Gap. What was the cause of all that? I don’t have any children so I don’t live with whatever generational differences exist today but I have a feeling that they are in not close to the generational alienation of those times in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
I look back now on the times rather blamelessly. I think we were all partially influenced by the power of corporate mass media marketing that used division as a way to sell. We were told that “our music” was new and exciting with no need to even look back at the old. We were alienated from our parents as a method of selling us stuff. Not only that, but mass media technology changed so rapidly in the 20th Century that the stuff from my parent’s time looked remote, distant, and old. By the time of the 1950 and 60 the technology was rather solid so that now children can look back 40 years into their parent’s childhood times without the technology itself presenting a sort of barrier. A child born in 1950 was only a little over 20 years away from the silent movie era.
The Vietnam War was something else with the USA changing from primarily defensive, arguably, in WWII, to a kind of imperialistic entity which it remains militarily. All the adults back then had been through WWII in one way of another, at home, or over there. My father was too young to be in WWII and watched it all as a growing boy in newsreels and Hollywood propaganda features all designed to support the seemingly noble effort to defeat the Axis enemy. This made a big impression on that generation, and that was largely transposed to support of the Vietnam War, the war my generation was being asked, well, with the draft in effect, demanded to participate in. We naturally saw it quite differently.
Not universally, after all many were called up, went and remained proud USA military people. These are the old men we sometimes see now with the Vietnam Veteran caps on their heads at the grocery store, or doctors office. The point is many people my age were unaffected or in reaction to the anti-war and hippie movements. The baby boomers were not ALL in the hippie and anti-war movements, rather only a large minority no matter the crowds in the Woodstock movie.
In this novel the 18/19 year old daughter character Melissa becomes a sort of international on-the-road hippie, hitching through Europe and on to India with a boy friend, a man she has run into on the road and takes up with after a questionable encounter. Dad is a 43 year old NYC professional photographer for like Time and Life, etc. Mom is 37 and works with challenged children. Before her pregnancy she wanted to be an actress, but Melissa came along when she was only 19. There is a hint of resentment in the mother for this early motherhood she was unprepared for. I think there was in my mother at well, whatever her youthful dreams were, dreams that were never shared with me if they existed at all.
They try to be permissive and patient with their daughter, but she keeps being harder to deal with when she takes off to Europe without even telling them. She has no apparent call to be mean. She was not a victim of any kind of abuse. She gets into some trouble in boarding school that seems to start her alienation and rebellion, she was at a party where some other kids were using pot, she didn’t, and was punished by being confined to campus at the school for a few weekends. Melissa is an only child and there is a feeling that she is a bit spoiled in that she gets what she wants. She eventually just does what she wants and reports back to her parents later.
The family drama goes on, the parents have trouble between themselves as mine did. The Generation Gap effected different classes but in some of the very same ways. It effected my family, me, and these characters who were far more wealthy professional class people.
I enjoy Evan Hunter’s novels and this one did not disappoint. It presents a lucid and entertaining picture of what The Generation Gap was to one family and likely many others.
January 7, 2020
a wonderful journal of sharing between a parent and child. As the journalist travelled he had wrote various notes to his child. I had read this and found it in a nursing facility as my mother was under their care. We enjoyed and I actually noted her medicine and vitamin needs in the pages, during the year. As we both had shared much, this book just resonates for a parent and child
August 9, 2018
Read this book years ago, but I can still remember how absorbing it was. Even though it was set in the 60's / 70's the themes it holds are still as relevant today, that of midlife crisis and teenagers struggle with and against authority figures. I feel it may be time for a re read.
December 6, 2022
I read this when I was a late teen in the early 80’s. It has stayed with me all these years. I think I’m going to have to find a copy for a reread.
March 2, 2023
Enjoyed it.
April 22, 2022
This book fell into my lap when I was in seventh grade - way too young for it, but at the time I didn't have anything else to read, so I jumped in. It wasn't THE first, but it was one of the first truly adult books I ever read, and it burned itself into my brain. I read it again twenty-five years later, and was surprised at how much I remembered, how many words and phrases I had learned from it.
"Love, Dad" is the story of the breakup of one family in the late '60's. Jamie comes from a working-class background and essentially lucked into his career as a well-known photographer; Connie is his well-bred, distant wife; Melissa is their daughter, and you can tell she's spoiled as soon as you learn that she goes by Lissie. On the surface, they're a happy family: they have a very nice house in the Connecticut suburbs; Jamie drives a Corvette, and Lissie goes to private school.
The book opens in December of 1968, on Lissie's 17th birthday, and soon we find out that all is not entirely cool or copacetic. Lissie gets in trouble in school, first for a rebellious prank involving panties, and then her roommate turns her on to weed. (Jamie does his best rich-dad routine with the headmaster and gets it straightened out.) Jamie and Connie's marriage is somewhat less than idyllic as well. Connie had a reputation as an "ice queen" in college, and not much has changed. She had great ambitions when she was young, and it would seem she still blames Jamie (whom you wonder if she ever really liked that much) for getting her pregnant and derailing her dreams and sentencing her to a life as a speech-pathologist in an elementary school. Also, we are given to understand she has never really liked sex. This becomes clearer to the reader on an Italian vacation, sans Lissie, when Connie picks a fight with Jamie to avoid conjugal relations. Back at home, Lissie meets some friends her mom wouldn't approve of and smokes more pot.
Things proceed downward when her parents return home. Jamie begins an affair with a younger woman while Lissie goes to Woodstock, loses her virginity (she likes it a lot more than her mom), and postpones college to move in with her hippie boyfriend. As Jamie's affair gets ever deeper, Lissie travels to Europe with a friend, where she really goes off the rails. By the time she shows up unannounced on her parents' doorstep on New Year's Eve 1971, she's a full-blown dirty hippie, crabs and all. Just in time for her parents' marriage to implode.
It sounds like a fairly typical story, but the characters are so deeply drawn that the book pulls you in immediately. These characters lived in my mind: bratty Lissie, frustrated Jamie, even bitchy Connie garnered some empathy. The atmosphere is so vivid you can smell it, from the mud of Woodstock with Lissie, to a cocktail party with Jamie and Connie and their well-heeled friends. All around them, the flower-power dream is dying: Lissie's high-school friends are using hard drugs or committing suicide, and the bonds that unite the Croft family are fraying and snapping.
I remember finding a review from the New York Times at the time of publication that was not very impressed with this book, and it doesn't seem to be all that well-regarded among Evan Hunter/Ed McBain's work. Maybe it came to me at just the right age (Jamie's graphic fantasy about the woman he met by the hotel pool in Italy absolutely fried my wiring), but this book has stayed with me through the years, and it's a personal all-time classic for me, however subjective that may be.
"Love, Dad" is the story of the breakup of one family in the late '60's. Jamie comes from a working-class background and essentially lucked into his career as a well-known photographer; Connie is his well-bred, distant wife; Melissa is their daughter, and you can tell she's spoiled as soon as you learn that she goes by Lissie. On the surface, they're a happy family: they have a very nice house in the Connecticut suburbs; Jamie drives a Corvette, and Lissie goes to private school.
The book opens in December of 1968, on Lissie's 17th birthday, and soon we find out that all is not entirely cool or copacetic. Lissie gets in trouble in school, first for a rebellious prank involving panties, and then her roommate turns her on to weed. (Jamie does his best rich-dad routine with the headmaster and gets it straightened out.) Jamie and Connie's marriage is somewhat less than idyllic as well. Connie had a reputation as an "ice queen" in college, and not much has changed. She had great ambitions when she was young, and it would seem she still blames Jamie (whom you wonder if she ever really liked that much) for getting her pregnant and derailing her dreams and sentencing her to a life as a speech-pathologist in an elementary school. Also, we are given to understand she has never really liked sex. This becomes clearer to the reader on an Italian vacation, sans Lissie, when Connie picks a fight with Jamie to avoid conjugal relations. Back at home, Lissie meets some friends her mom wouldn't approve of and smokes more pot.
Things proceed downward when her parents return home. Jamie begins an affair with a younger woman while Lissie goes to Woodstock, loses her virginity (she likes it a lot more than her mom), and postpones college to move in with her hippie boyfriend. As Jamie's affair gets ever deeper, Lissie travels to Europe with a friend, where she really goes off the rails. By the time she shows up unannounced on her parents' doorstep on New Year's Eve 1971, she's a full-blown dirty hippie, crabs and all. Just in time for her parents' marriage to implode.
It sounds like a fairly typical story, but the characters are so deeply drawn that the book pulls you in immediately. These characters lived in my mind: bratty Lissie, frustrated Jamie, even bitchy Connie garnered some empathy. The atmosphere is so vivid you can smell it, from the mud of Woodstock with Lissie, to a cocktail party with Jamie and Connie and their well-heeled friends. All around them, the flower-power dream is dying: Lissie's high-school friends are using hard drugs or committing suicide, and the bonds that unite the Croft family are fraying and snapping.
I remember finding a review from the New York Times at the time of publication that was not very impressed with this book, and it doesn't seem to be all that well-regarded among Evan Hunter/Ed McBain's work. Maybe it came to me at just the right age (Jamie's graphic fantasy about the woman he met by the hotel pool in Italy absolutely fried my wiring), but this book has stayed with me through the years, and it's a personal all-time classic for me, however subjective that may be.
November 4, 2011
this book is amazing, it intimately describes the complex relationship between a father and daughter throughout her life. I found this book so engrossing because it seems very rare for to find a book written about a father daughter relationship. This book is a memorable read and I highly recommend it as it kept me on the edge of my bed hurrying to turn the pages in order to see just how this relationship would develop next. Set to a backdrop of the 60's and an era of social change the book shows the often overlooked importance of a father in a daughters life.
September 9, 2007
I first read this book in high school, and it remains one of my absolute favorites. It's about a relationship between a father and his daughter in the 1960's - her individuation, his evolution, and their evoultion together as father/daughter.
May 28, 2012
The first Evan Hunter book that I read. It was a mesmerizing look at a modern relationship between a father who struggles to connect and a daughter whose fight to be independent take on tragic twists.
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August 9, 2009This is a book I was reading back in 2002. I moved and it got packed and I haven't found where it went. This was a really good book and I am hoping I will find it and get to finish it one day.
May 3, 2011
Read this in college and STILL think back on it from time to time.
August 31, 2011
The dissolution of a family by drugs and adultery.
May 31, 2013
I found this book at an op shop. Best two dollars I have ever spent. It is insightful and thought provoking. Recommend to anyone who wants a good read!
August 23, 2013
It seemed like a good story, but I just couldn't get through it, especially certain scenes.
April 6, 2014
Evan Hunter foi um mestre neste estilo; descrição das relações entre gerações...
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews