Since my dad is (a) driving with Mom somewhere in Canada with the cellphone off, (b) doesn’t get online at all (but does ask us kids to look up things when visiting), and (c) probably doesn’t know exactly what a blog is, I’ll still wish him Happy Father’s Day here as we look back at some fictional fathers in recent BooksYALove recommendations.

In YA books, dads can often be a cipher, just kind of a placeholder while Mom is the key figure – try Ten Miles Past Normal and Stolen for father-who’s-there-but-barely. Other times, Dad has to fill both parental roles (Zen & Xander Undone -not so well, and I Love Him to Pieces, much better).

Some are adoptive fathers as in Dogtag Summer and Heart of a Samurai, while others are fathers no longer in the child’s home, like This Thing Called the Future.

We have bumbling-yet-well-meaning fathers in Kat, Incorrigible and Visconti House, then trying-the-best-they-can dads in What Happened to Goodbye and Astronaut Academy.

Plenty of papas are long, long gone, as in Flawless and Fire, while others are rather too involved in their teenagers’ lives (Awaken, anyone?), as far as the teens are concerned.

Fathers might leave through divorce (Who Is Frances Rain?) or through death (Saraswati’s Way and Trickster’s Girl), and yet young adults must cope with their changed world, a world with one pair of guiding hands forever gone…

Of course, we’ll find these various sorts of fathers, father-figures, and conspicuous-by-their-absence fathers as we go along on BooksYALove = family is so often a key element in YA fiction.

So, wish a dad Happy Father’s Day today, even if he’s not your dad; there’s enough love to go around, right?
**kmm