Dad

Can an underachieving son reconnect with his father before it's too late?

Jacob's life is already complicated enough. Now his Dad, whose mind isn't as sharp as it once was, is driving out for a visit. Or he was, before he got lost along the way. Now it's up to Jacob to get this right.

A touching story about families, relationships, and aging parents.

Editorial Review by Jon Michael Miller of Readers' Favorite

In Dad by Bob Seay, we meet Jacob, our narrator and protagonist, in his mid to late thirties, struggling both in his professional world and in his marriage. With his "compulsion to tell everybody everything," he tells us his story as if we are his best friends, exposing all his failures and amusing quirks. Brooke, his wife, wants all his money, and he has lost his job as a high school teacher. In survival mode, he lives in Colorado and works as a ghost-writer of term papers for college students. He lives and works online from the back room of a laundry. His squalid existence is interrupted when he is informed by his brother back in Cincinnati that their dad, suffering from Alzheimer's, has hit the road and is in a hotel room in Kansas City, Missouri. Jacob is the logical person to collect his old man. In so doing, he finds his dad having lunch with a hotel maid Amelia, who is watching over him. We soon become familiar with the sights along Interstate 70, as his dad tells Jacob about installing communications devices in St. Louis's Gateway Arch. He has other stories about his activities on Mars and in submarines.

Despite Jacob's honest flaws and his relentless search for self and redemption, I came to like and even to identify with him. Yes, he is largely responsible, as he admits, for his own problems. Fortunately, he is in a stable, tight-knit family, all intent on taking care of their sad, but sometimes funny dad. But I felt that Dad is the vehicle of the real underlying story, which is Jacob trying to dig himself out of the hole he has dug for himself. He meets his female spiritual twin in the person of Amelia, not really a hotel housekeeper but a refugee from nursing and an aspiring artist. She escapes from an abusive, Confederate flag-flying boyfriend into Jacob's black Mustang convertible, nicknamed Beast, which hauls Jacob back and forth several times between Denver, Kansas City, Topeka, and Cincinnati. "We're all doing the best we can," says Amelia compassionately. I was both sadly moved and often amused by Jacob's search for a better life. And along with the story, we learn a lot from the various topics Jacob ghost-writes about-nursing burnout, the Feds, Buddhism, and neo-Nazis, to name only a few. Oh, yes, and the Stanford Marshmallow Index, which somehow nibbles at Jacob's core. And we meet a quirky, loving family in the turmoil of losing the family patriarch, who is quite an overarching backdrop in his own right. Author Bob Seay dedicates his novel Dad "to all families with aging parents," and I cannot imagine a more accurate portrayal or one more moving.