Replacing Dad

by Shelley Fraser Mickle

Overview

Set on the Gulf Coast of Florida, the Marsh family faces what many American families have experienced in the last few decades: the reorganization of the family through divorce. This bittersweet novel has been called by one reviewer the funniest story since Auntie Mame. As mother Linda Marsh re-enters the dating world at the same time that her 15-year-old son does, comic, realistic situations develop. Eventually the three Marsh children and their mother, Linda, learn that the change in the family demands that they embrace the future and change with it. This novel became a CBS/Hallmark Channel movie in l999, starring Mary McDonnell, Tippi Hedren, Camilla Belle, Eric Von Detten as well as other renowned actors. The novel has been used in high school classes, college literature courses, and family study groups in discussions on adjustment to divorce.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781456616601
Publisher:	eBookIt.com
Publication date:	06/18/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	246
File size:	629 KB

About the Author

The Queen of October, named by the New York Times as a Notable Book of 1989, is Shelley Fraser Mickle's first novel. She has since published Replacing Dad with Algonquin Books.

Editorial Reviews

Dad--George Marsh, the popular school principal in tiny Palm Key on the mud coast of Florida--is already gone when Mickle's second novel opens: he's left wife Linda, sons Drew and George the Second, and daughter Mandy to move in with Anne Marie, Mandy's vapid but pretty fifth-grade teacher. This sad, funny, and wise tale of how Linda and her children break out of suspended animation and build a rewarding, satisfying life-without-father for themselves has two narrators. Teenaged Drew is no hero at school (or in a car), but he negotiates the shoals of adolescence and the sandbars of becoming the man of his family as gracefully as he steers his fishing boat out into the Gulf. Linda, college dropout, housewife, mother, and artist, works outside her home for the first time--first as a secretary at the county dump, then as an assistant at the town's new medical clinic--and draws support from her children and friends old and new as she rediscovers herself--"someone," she says, "ZI had not visited in a long while." Mickle--whose first novel, "The Queen of October" , was a "New York Times" Notable Book--uses a perceptive eye and a compassionate heart in creating a family whose hesitations and advances, failures, hopes, and triumphs ring with the vibrant authenticity of stories most readers will have heard from their neighbors and coworkers, cousins and college roommates.

Mary Carroll