Showing 51 - 60 of 258 annotations tagged with the keyword "Father-Daughter Relationship"

Sailing

Kenney, Susan

Last Updated: Feb-12-2012
Annotated by:
McEntyre, Marilyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

A few years into their marriage, while their children are still young, Sara and Phil discover that he has an aggressive form of cancer.  He undergoes grueling surgery, but the cancer returns.  For Sara the prospect of Phil's death reawakens the trauma of losing her father when she was twelve.  Phil does his best to live a normal life between chemotherapy treatments and further surgeries, and even enters an experimental treatment in hope of seeing his children grow up.  His greatest pleasure in life is sailing, and one of his deepest hopes for his remaining time with his family to enjoy sailing with them in the ocean near their New England home.  But Sara finds it scary, even though she gamely learns to crew, and the kids never take to it.  So Phil sails with friends, and sometimes alone.  After learning that the cancer has continued to spread despite every medical effort, Phil decides to take one last sailing trip, this time alone, on the ocean.  There he has to make a decision:  his intention is simply to sail until his body gives out and die on the boat he loves, sparing Sara, he thinks, having to watch him die a slow and painful death.  But he begins to realize that letting her see him through might, after all, be a better way to go.  As the novel ends, he turns the boat, now quite far from land, toward home.  

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In Another Country

Kenney, Susan

Last Updated: Jan-17-2012
Annotated by:
McEntyre, Marilyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

In this series of six linked stories the narrator, Sara Boyd, weaves together stories of loss: her father's death when she was twelve, her husband's diagnosis of terminal kidney cancer, her mother's recurrent descent into mental illness, and even the death of a beloved dog. The stories merge in ways that reinforce the notion that new griefs bring up old ones, and that the trajectories of mourning are unpredictable and sometimes surprising in the conflicting currents of emotion they evoke. Sara doesn't present her life only in terms of losses, but the losses frame the story in such a way as to suggest that while key losses may not trump all other life-shaping events, they do organize and color them. The mother's mental illness is, in its way, a crueler loss than the death of Sara's beloved father, since hope of recovery keeps being dashed. Her siblings and children are marginal characters, but enter the stories enough to develop complex family contexts of caregiving.

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The Art of Racing in the Rain

Stein, Garth

Last Updated: Jan-06-2012
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

The story of race-car driver Denny Swift, as told by his appealing dog, Enzo, is his death-basket memoir. Denny’s tale of woe seems endless. His wife, Eve, dies of a brain tumour and he is in a struggle with her parents for custody of his daughter Zoë. Making matters worse, he is falsely accused of raping a minor by a 15 year-old who has a crush on him.

Enzo would love to intervene. However, he is frustrated by his inability to speak and his lack of opposable thumbs—but he sees clearly the worth of his master and the need for careful perseverance—like racing in the rain.

 

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Stone's Fall

Pears, Iain

Last Updated: Jan-03-2012
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

The wealthy financier, John William Stone, is found dead beneath the window of his home, having fallen, jumped, or been pushed. The will charges his widow, Elizabeth Lady Ravenscliff, with finding Stone’s lost child. She had known nothing about this episode in his life, but she is determined to honour his wish.

The story centers on a financial mystery told in three parts that move further back in time: London 1909, Paris 1890, and Venice 1867. Each story gives a different version of Elizabeth – none refutes any of the others.

In the first part, Elizabeth is cool, superior and in charge, but her grief is genuine. She hires Matthew Braddock to look for the missing child, suggesting that he pose as a hired biographer. The writer is smitten with Elizabeth and concludes that there was no lost child.

The second part is narrated by a spy, Henry Cort. In this version, Elizabeth began as a waif who became a high-class prostitute, involved in affairs of state. Addicted to drugs, she was dangerous and selfish, but Cort never realizes that she is his sister.

The last (but earliest) part is told by Stone himself about an affair he once had in Venice and its sorry end. The last few pages draw the disparate threads together and account cleverly for all the mysteries.

 

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The Trapper's Last Shot

Yount, John

Last Updated: Dec-16-2011
Annotated by:
Ratzan, Richard M.

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

The Trapper’s Last Shot opens in 1960 when Beau Jim Early is returning home to Cocke County, Georgia, after 6 years in the U.S. Army. Beau Jim moves in with Dan, his brother, who is 15 years older and now a farmer, both of them survivors of a fire that killed their parents and drove them from North Carolina. Living with Dan in very straitened circumstances are his mean-spirited and child-abusing wife, Charlene, and Sheila, their thumb-sucking 7 year old who is about to repeat first grade, perhaps in part due to the literal pillow-smothering attacks at the hands of Charlene when she was still an infant, and assuredly in part due to the intellectually barren home life described.

Beau Jim realizes his immediate post-service dream of enrolling in college, nearby Senneca College, while learning to hustle pool with Claire, his high school classmate now mentor. Claire is a worldly wise alcoholic homosexual who has learned how to survive in the deep South as such while remaining just below the radar of his homophobic, racist white contemporaries. Somewhere amidst all this hubbub Beau Jim meets up with an old high school classmate, Yancey, and, a trifle improbably, becomes her beau as well as her Beau.

Although enjoying college and doing well, Beau Jim begins to doubt his intellectual fit as a college man, given his background and temperament. Shortly after, he and Claire suffer a beating at the hands of the stereotypically vicious local Deputy Sheriff Earl Wagner, a beating initiated by Claire’s homosexuality, which Jim had not suspected. This beating is the penultimate climactic event in the book: Jim quits college; Claire effectually disappears from view; and the focus now shifts to Dan and his struggling farm and family life.

Charlene, in a fit of pique over Dan’s decision to have her milk the cow to save money, sets the barn on fire (a fact never discovered by Dan), kills the cow and, in so doing, detonates the apocalyptic sequence of events that close this dark novel in an even more noir fashion. Dan snaps mentally, shooting to death an entire family of innocent blacks whom he knew and respected, as well as a stranger, a college student at Senneca.

The final pages, like the opening ones, provide a bookend (literally) of bleakness: we find Beau Jim working as a mason in  a new town with despicably mean white masons in a dead end job as he tries to establish a family life with Yancey and Sheila, whom Charlene is more than happy to be offloading on them. Unlike the initial pages, the ending offers a glimmer of the hope for an intact family life for Beau and Yancey and Sheila.

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Summary:

Creation tells the story of Charles Darwin (Paul Bettany) at home with his family in Down House during the last decade he researched and wrote, but hesitated to publish, The Origin of Species (1859).  The film represents the sorrow of those intellectually ripe years when he worked out his insights into the process of natural selection as his "radiant," beloved daughter Annie-Anne Elizabeth-(Martha West) became fatally ill.  These events were compounded by Darwin's own mysterious chronic illness, which he attempted to relieve through laudanum and trips to Great Malvern for Gulley's cold water cures.

In 1851 he took a very sick ten-year-old Annie with him to the waters and, inconsolable, left her to be buried in the local churchyard.  Through his physical and emotional suffering, he continued to dissect barnacles, breed and skeletonize pigeons, engage the village parson and local farmers alike, consult with supporters Thomas Hooker and Thomas Huxley, exchange hundreds of letters, and remain an affectionate father and husband. 

The loss of "the joy of the Household" strengthened his wife Emma's (Jennifer Connelly) religious beliefs, as it exhausted whatever might have existed of his. The story, artfully told in beautifully sequenced flashbacks, keeps the tensions and accommodations between Charles and Emma on the subject of religious faith in balance, emphasizing their loving partnership as spouses and parents.  Emma supported his work, read his manuscript, and understood its importance, even as she disagreed with its implications for her spiritual life.  Darwin contributed to the local parish church Emma attended.    

Some of the most compelling moments in the film occur during Darwin's joyous outings with his children when they suddenly witness the demise of woodland creatures.  In these scenes, the ineluctable struggles between life and death that Darwin's theory of natural selection eloquently describes resonate with his personal experience.  We see a fledgling fall from its nest near a sheep's skull and decay before our eyes.  We hear Annie explain to her horrified siblings that if the fox they encounter didn't kill the screeching rabbit in its jaws, its pups would die.

These scenes, along with the earlier view of the captive Fuegian child Boat Memory dying of small pox in an English hospital, suggest the fragility of the young that Annie's death makes devastatingly personal for Darwin.  The film simultaneously acknowledges Darwin's empirically derived logic of such deaths in his scientific treatise and his suffering from the brutal manifestations of that logic in the life of his family.  While scientific explanation fails to console him for the loss of Annie, the film suggests human affection as the best, though still potentially painful response.     

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Lucy

Gonzales, Laurence

Last Updated: Sep-07-2010
Annotated by:
Ratzan, Richard M.

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Lucy is a novel named for the female hybrid offspring born of a bonobo mother and human father, a creature called, at various times, a "humanzee" since the bonobo, a great ape found in the Congo in Africa, is occasionally referred to as a pygmy chimpanzee. The result of artificial insemination by her father, Donald Stone, a British anthropologist in the Congo with aims to improve the human species, Lucy is a very human looking 15 year old girl.

The novel begins in medias res when Jenny Lowe, an American primatologist whose camp is near Dr. Stone's, is awakened by the sound of gun fire from nearby insurgents.   She goes to Dr. Stone‘s camp, finds the anthropologist and an adult female bonobo lying on the ground, both dead from gun shot wounds. Near the two bodies is a living teen aged girl, Lucy, whom she rescues and manages to spirit back to her home base, Chicago, where Jenny‘s friend and lover, Harry Prendeville, a charismatic surgeon, awaits her. Lucy enrolls in high school, her genetic heritage kept secret from all save Jenny who discovers -- in one of several nods to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein -- Dr. Stone's notebooks.

Lucy meets and becomes best friends with Amanda Mather, a classmate (this relationship is far from clearly a strictly heterosexual one) and becomes the state wrestling champ because of her bonobo-inherited skill, strength and speed. When Lucy contracts a viral disease that bonobos, not humans, acquire and her secret is about to be exposed (Jenny, Amanda and Harry now all know), Lucy does what all 15 year olds would do in 2010 (the book is set in present time) - she outs herself on Facebook. (O tempora, O mores!)

The novel now enters the accelerated phase of denouement with expected and unexpected reactions from TV, the violent right (think Mickey the Gerund in Cast of Shadows in this database), Congress and the public. Without revealing too much plot as a spoiler, suffice it to say that a governmental scheme to abduct Lucy for the purpose of NHP (non-human primate) experimentation becomes a reality with devastating consequences that allow for a thrilling read with its share of tragedy and triumphs and ending with an unusual yet fulfilling conclusion satisfying for most concerned, especially Lucy and those who love her.

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Annotated by:
Schilling, Carol

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

Extraordinary Measures, based on events in the life of John Crowley and his family, dramatizes the father's quest to find a cure for Pompe disease, a relatively rare genetic condition that afflicts two of his three children.  The quest brings into play three powerful, often competing human motives:  a father's love for his children, a scientist's pursuit of knowledge and recognition, and a corporation's mandate for profits.  Crowley (Brendan Fraser), an energetic marketing executive, and his wife Aileen (Keri Russell) are told that their children Megan (Meredith Droeger), age eight, and Patrick (Diego Velazquez), age six, have reached the upper limits of their life expectancies.

When Megan, an affectionate, playful, and clear-sighted child, is rushed to the hospital with symptomatic heart and respiratory failure, a young physician empathically encourages the parents to think of their only daughter's immanent death as a "blessing" that will end her suffering.  However, Megan survives.  "So I guess you could say we dodged that blessing," Crowley echoes back to the doctor.  Seeing Megan's will to live reinforces John's wish to make her well, and he abruptly abandons his promising career to find a medical researcher who can reverse Pompe's effects. 

Immersing himself in medical journals and websites, John discovers the intriguing research of Robert Stonehill (Harrison Ford).  A cranky, renegade scientist who thinks to the beat of rock music blasting from a boom box, Stonehill has developed a cutting-edge theory about correcting the enzyme deficiency in the cells of people with Pompe, which gradually weakens skeletal, respiratory, and heart muscles.  However, to produce a treatment derived from his theory, he needs more funding.  John immediately creates a fund to support Pompe research, and he and Stonehill form a mutually exasperating partnership.  They lock horns with each other, venture capitalists, and finally a large genomic research corporation, Zymagen.

Despite the scientist's abrasive ways, Zymagen gives Stonehill a lab and creates employment for Crowley.  However, the two confront the company's culture of rigorous competition among its scientists and its focus on profit margins that ignore the fates of individual children.  When the Zymagen scientists develop a promising therapy, they decide to offer the treatment only to infants, who are most likely to experience benefits.  Disqualifying Crowley's children from the promising trials, this decision, combined with Crowley's obvious conflict of interest, creates the film's final obstacle.  Stonehill and the executives uncharacteristically collaborate to overcome it. 

This ending might seem implausibly neat, but it's consistent with the film's mostly evenhanded approach to the dilemmas of pursuing treatments for orphan diseases.  Toward the end, we witness even Crowley, albeit uncomfortably, reaching beyond his fatherly motives for the Pompe project and turning his argument for bringing the treatment to market from children to profits.  The longer the patients live, John assures the executives, the more treatments Zymagen will sell.  The film leaves space for viewers to ask to what extent Crowley's argument creates a fair compromise or opens an ethical quandary.  In a closing narration, the film moves beyond the fictionalized characters and plot to the real Crowley children and a tempered victory.  Yes, the Pompe treatment stopped the progression of the disease and improved Megan's and Patrick's hearts.  But it has not cured the Crowley children, and almost certainly it won't.   The treatments do, however, show more success when taken at the onset of symptoms.      

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The Unnamed

Ferris, Joshua

Last Updated: Mar-29-2010
Annotated by:
Henderson, Schuyler

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Tim Farnsworth is a well-regarded lawyer at a fancy, cutthroat midtown law firm in New York City, with a devoted, if occasionally uncertain, wife and a rebellious teenage daughter.  Their comfortable marriage has survived her bout with cancer and his earlier bout with a strange condition: he will suddenly be compelled to walk, setting out on foot regardless of where he is or what he is doing, unable to stop himself until he eventually curls up asleep, whatever the weather and conditions around him.  He is about to lead the defence of a prominent businessman charged in the slaying of his wife when the condition abruptly returns.

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The Sweet Hereafter

Banks, Russell

Last Updated: Mar-22-2010
Annotated by:
Wear, Delese

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

This is a novel that begins with a fatal school bus accident in Sam Dent, a small town in upstate New York. The circumstances leading up to the accident appear in the first chapter, whose narrator is the bus driver Dolores Driscoll. The remaining chapters have three different narrators: Billy Ansel, who lost a son and daughter and now drinks himself into a less painful state; Mitchell Stephens, a lawyer from New York City who appears days after the accident, fueled by his belief that there is no such thing as an accident, himself the grieving father of a drug-addicted daughter; Nichole Burnell, a teenage survivor of the crash, now a parapalegic. Each presents a different view because of the unique history each brought to the tragedy.

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