Dear Dad

An intimate YA novel from the celebrated author of the Cammie Turple series depicting one teen boy's reckoning with his father's terminal illness, and his right to choose MAID.

It's not some abstract debate. It's his dad's life.

It's 2014 and the Ice Bucket Challenge is everywhere. You know, people posting videos of themselves dumping freezing ice water over their heads to raise money for ALS research.

It's weird, everyone suddenly talking about ALS, because Sam's family has been dealing with it ever since his dad, Gregory, was diagnosed three years ago. His dad, a brilliant lawyer, stopped working, then stopped walking, and now he can't even talk. His mom quit her job to take care of him. And now Sam is quitting the one thing he's amazing at: hockey. It sucks to have to stop, but it's exhausting trying to do normal-life things when life is anything but normal.

Everything is complicated and messy and hard―especially the way Gregory has been thinking about things since his diagnosis. Death. Medical assistance in dying. The right for terminally ill people―people like Gregory―to choose when they go.

Sam's trying to be supportive; he reads all the arguments for legalizing MAID, and even goes to a rally. But the idea of helping his father die is like a weight pressing down on him, and it gets heavier and heavier until something snaps, and he does the only thing he can think of. Sam bolts.

He takes a job as a farmhand for a weird old guy way out in the country. From here, in the middle of the woods, it's not clear if Sam will ever find a way back to his family…or if he even has a family to go back to.

How can a fourteen-year-old possibly wrap his head around something the whole country is fighting about?

Dear Dad is a brave and hopeful look at a teen boy's struggle with his father's terminal illness, disability, and death.

Laura Best is the author of six books for young people including Cammie Takes Flight, which was nominated for the 2018 Silver Birch Award. Her work has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies across Canada. Her first novel for adults, Good Mothers Don't, was published in 2020 and was nominated for The Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award. She lives in East Dalhousie, Nova Scotia, with her husband, Brian. Visit her at lauraabest.wordpress.com.