OFF WITH THE OLD, ON WITH THE NEW

BRITT is the winner of the second May contest. Please contact me at bhansen22 at msn dot com to let me know which book you would like and to give me your mailing address. Remember your prize doesn't have to be one of the three books featured for this contest. If you choose a different book, please give me a wishlist of books to select from. Congratulations!

Since Father’s Day is this month, I decided to offer books for the first half of June contest that are all written by men, are told from a male point of view, and all have strong, masculine covers. If the winner is so inclined, one would make a fine Fathers’ Day gift. Two are even stories of father/son relationships.

Most LDS fiction is written from a female point of view and the majority of the authors are also women. Most LDS novels are also purchased by women, though it is much harder to pin point whether readers are more typically female or not since most of the well-known authors have both male and female fans, women give books as gifts, and large numbers of men read whichever books their wives bring home, even the romances. Several male authors such as Gerald Lund, Dean Hughes, and Lee Nelson have garnered huge followings among both men and women. One area where I see a real shortage of males writing for males is in youth fiction except in the science fiction/fantasy genre. Alma J. Yates is one of the few male writers who writes realistic fiction for and about young men.

Yates is a favorite author who has given us a number of books written for young men, but his stories have a much broader appeal than just to his target audience. Finding Dad is one such story. It is the story of a man who left his wife, the small town he grew up in, and his young son to discover a bigger world. After years on a road leading nowhere, he begins to get his life back together. Then he receives word his ex-wife has died and that his sixteen-year-old son he left behind ten years earlier is now his responsibility. He returns to claim his son and discovers a stranger who isn’t eager to go with him. He agrees to go only on the condition that his broken-down truck must go with them, even if the two of them have to push it the entire five hundred miles.

Recovering Charles by Jason F. Wright is another father and son story though the son is an adult and the father is a derelict old man, an alcoholic who has pretty much destroyed his life and his relationship with his son. The father was an enabler who catered to his wife’s prescription drug addiction until her death when he became an alcohol addict and his son stepped into the role of enabler. The son finally takes a stand and refuses to support his father’s addiction. That’s when he becomes branded an unsympathetic and unnatural son. Forced to survive on his own, the father, cleans up his act enough to be accepted by a group of bar buddies in New Orleans just before Hurricane Katrina hits. That’s when his father’s friends perpetrate a cruel hoax on the son.

Most so-called “men’s novels” focus on war or the wild west. Brad E. Hainsworth wrote Revenge and Redemption, a civil war era story of political intrigue, suspense, and a touch of romance. This book ranges from Utah to the bloody civil war battlefields and the halls of government in Washington D.C. It begins after the battle of Glorieta Pass in New Mexico, one of the few Civil War battles fought in the West. It features Clay Ashworth who returns to his ranch in Utah to find his wife pregnant with their first child. The child is stillborn and in her grief, she runs away, presumably back to Mexico. Another prominent character is Porter Rockwell’s old enemy, Wolf Striker, who survived the battle at Glorieta Pass.

Buckshot Higgins, His Life and Treasures by Charles Moore Hackley III is another western. This one is set in New Mexico among the native population there. Since the earliest settlements by Spaniards in the Southwest, there have been legends of buried treasure, hidden gold, and secret stashes of ancient valuables. This book centers around one such legend and though the legend may be myth or reality, the background details of the natives, their culture, and the mountains and mesas are authentic.

I’ll send two, your choice, of these books to the person whose name I draw from those who submit thoughtful comments concerning your father , your husband, or a father you consider exemplary between now and noon June 15.