Here Lies a Father

October 5, 2020
In Cassidy’s engrossing debut, a teenager in upstate New York makes a painful discovery about his late father. Ian Daly’s parents had been separated for six months before his father, Thomas, died. After Ian arrives from Wellbourne, N.Y., in his father’s hometown for the funeral, he learns his father had two previous families he never knew about. Ian’s relationship with Thomas had already been strained by Thomas’s drinking and long stretches away from home for temporary work at a series of vacation resorts, and as Ian meets various relatives and exes of his father, he’s disappointed his overtures toward them are met coldly. While he learns more about the dark history of his father’s treatment of his other families, Ian also deals with pressure from his best friend, Scott, and a beer-guzzling bully, Rick, to party and hook up with girls back home in Wellbourne. Boxing lessons help him find the strength and courage to make his own choices, though Cassidy’s treatment of the gym and the training leaves a bit to be desired. Still, the author convincingly depicts the ways his sensitive, turbulent protagonist navigates the murky period between adolescence and adulthood. Cassidy’s distinctive coming-of-age story will move readers.

November 1, 2020
Fifteen-year-old Ian Daly is a curious combination of hard-bitten adolescent and walking blind spot, a na�ve old soul who knows too much and not nearly enough. Ian makes a compelling narrator, the heart and soul of Cassidy's debut novel. In a sense, he's so self-aware that he comes to realize he isn't: "Thinking back, there had been so many signs, clues that for a less gullible person would've shown the man behind the curtain pulling the strings, but I either failed to notice or wasn't able to." In Ian's defense, he comes from a family of adept string-pullers. As the novel begins, he accompanies his older sister to his father's funeral, where they're stunned to learn about the old man's first wife. And there are more shocks to come. Staying at his aunt's house for the weekend, Ian takes us tripping through one adeptly arranged flashback after another, using a dry sense of humor to make sense of a deceit-laden life. Was his dad really trying to find a killer job, or was he drinking away his life with women not his wives? Did Ian's mom really not know what was going on, or was she lying to her son all along? Cassidy keeps such questions bubbling beneath the surface of the novel and Ian's consciousness; as the boy slowly figures things out, we feel bilked for him. The novel's vivid upstate New York universe of blue-collar neighborhoods gives Ian's surroundings a heavy coat of realism, as do the insecurities, sexual and otherwise, suffered by Ian and his few friends. Ian is a worthy literary cousin of Holden Caulfield, another kid with little tolerance for fakes and phonies and too much hard-won skepticism for his age. The grown-ups have let Ian down; now he must create himself. An adolescent faces his family of liars with a spirit reminiscent of Holden Caulfield.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.