Books, like life, are filled with good—sometimes even great—fathers. Ditto for the tyrants. For every noble Atticus Finch-like character, there are some real stinkers, the love-to-hate-them kind of Dad, like Larry Cook, a modern-day King Lear, in “A Thousand Acres.”
It is easy to cheer for the good guys and boo the baddies, but what about the in-betweens, those who are neither patient nor prudent, but who are certainly not evil? Often, it is the flawed characters―the quirky, irresponsible, feckless, fickle, irascible, hyperbolic, conflicted, cowardly, and sometimes even absent―who make the most engagingly readable characters.