Paternity

James Schaap has created powerful stories about fathers and their kids big kids, even grown-up ones. Sometimes it s from the father s viewpoint, sometimes that of the son or daughter. Always it s a reality check, a yardstick to measure what we know or don t know about our own critical relationships.

These vignettes are life lived out in all its joy and tenderness and grief and hard complexity. Some of it is rather harsh stuff; it s not prettified to meet a certain standard of purity. Happy endings are not a given. Grace is in ways we always knew and never knew, in ways that unexpectedly satisfy. We want more because here we have tasted the real thing. Here is love that will not let us go.