Father’s Day by Simon Van Booy

Another Van Booy book down the hatch! This novel was sentimental- maybe a bit too sentimental for my liking- but I do enjoy the way the author writes, so it was easy to finish anyways. The story is about a young girl – Harvey – who ends up in foster care because her parents die in a car accident. She has never met her paternal uncle, Jason, but has heard stories about him — not much from what we understand, but she advocates her social worker for placement with him. He’s got a violent streak and has been in prison and hasn’t seen his brother since he was incarcerated, meaning he also never met his wife, Harvey’s mother — who forbade her husband from talking to his bad seed brother. The social worker has been in the field a long time and works with the uncle to become Harvey’s father.

The book ebbs into Harvey’s young adulthood where she is in Paris working as an artist for a firm and her adoptive father comes to visit her in Paris. The story moves between time periods of her childhood and their visit in Paris. She makes him a box full of Father’s Day gifts that bring back memories and moves us through her experiences.

Jason is self deprecating throughout the entire novel and never gains confidence despite the unconditional love he and Harvey share — I think this might be part of what frustrated me a bit about this book. Enough already kind of thing– we get it, you’ve made mistakes.

The end of the novel is both predictable and not — (spoiler alert!) Harvey finds out through her paperwork needed to be hired in Paris (if I’m recalling correctly) that she was actually adopted by her parents who died and that Jason is her real father, her mother being the love of his life Rita, who he lost because of his violent behavior and drinking during the earlier part of his life. She died of cancer years prior and had tried to contact Jason through letters but he never read them and burned them instead.

Again, not trying to sound overly negative, but this is not the best Van Booy book I’ve read, but the story is sound and it definitely tugged at my heartstrings. I also think the name Harvey is pretty bad ass for a girl 🙂