Middle-Grade Book Review: 'My Father's Words' by Patricia MacLachlan

“My Father’s Words” Doesn’t Have Much to Say 

A special thank you to HarperCollins Children's and Katherine Tegen Books for sending me an advanced reader copy of this book for an honest review. (Book to be released 10/02/18)



Potential. It’s a word that comes to mind when I consider Patricia MacLachlan’s latest middle-grade book. In her foreword, MacLachlan confesses My Father’s Words is based off a true story. And that she hopes readers can learn hidden details about their loved ones from other people who were close to them. Her intentions, simplistic as they are, are obvious from the get-go. Paired with a simplistic cover, featuring a boy and girl strolling past trees each walking a dog looking as though they were finger painted, the first impression is that My Father’s Words is going to be one of those charming animal books with a dash of coming of age. 

My Father’s Words makes a less than half-hearted attempt to be any of those. 

That potential I mentioned above? It disintegrates into nothingness.  

My Father’s Words is a story centered around brother and sister Finn and Fiona, both grieving after their father is struck by a car and killed. The siblings, their family friend Luke, and their mother are thrown out of sorts with the loss of Declan O’Brien --aka dad and hubs (to Luke, next door neighbor)--a psychologist with a love for singing Irish songs and passing out bits of advice to his children like breadcrumbs to pigeons. Declan’s absence is a gaping hole in everyone’s life. 

Finn and Fiona, with the encouragement of their friend Luke, end up volunteering to walk, talk to, pet and play with dogs at their local animal shelter. Maybe the abandoned and surrendered canines can help kickstart their healing and soothe their heartache. 

At least, that’s the idea. Enter many paragraphs of descriptionless time spent with descriptionless dogs. 

Then the storyline quickly tilts to include a side-plot. Like an afterthought one of Declan’s former patients, a young man named Thomas begins to call Fiona every Monday for two minutes. His M.O. is to share little memories of Declan with Fiona. Instead, his two-cent advice brings nothing new to the story. Everything Thomas has to say is canned and cliche. 

 To put it bluntly, My Father’s Words is a dud. The dialog is wooden and stilted to the point that almost every line I read made me cringe. I couldn’t get over the feeling that this was an adult WRITING a story about children. Maybe McLachlan was aiming for “mature” with the way she wrote the conversations between Luke, Finn, and Fiona. Truth bomb: it’s stale. None of them have their own voice or personality.  

Here’s one small snippet between Fiona and Luke:

“Finn is doing much better,” he said. 

I nodded. “But he still comes to curl up in my bed at night. He cries in his sleep.”

“He’s thinking about the accident. And wanting to find someone to blame,” said Luke. 

I sighed. Jenny nosed my hand. 

“She’s comforting you,” said Luke. 

“Yes. Jenny comforts me.”

On top of that, there is a lack of anything descriptive. The dogs Fiona and Finn spend so many hours with are never depicted as anything more than just “dogs”. There’s no description of what they look like or how they act other than what we’re told. Luke’s canine companion is merely “large” and “impossible”. 

For the entirety of My Father’s Words, we’re incessantly told how Fiona, Finn and their mother feel. Telling telling telling. For me, it’s an unforgivable book sin. Kinda like the unforgivable curses in the Harry Potter series. It should be criminal. Excessive “telling” not only waters down the impact of a novel but it smooshes it in the reader's face that they NEED to be told and they couldn’t possibly figure out what’s going on otherwise. 

Beyond those blunders, the narrative is discombobulated as hell. One moment jumps to the next without any sense of time or place. MacLachlan’s writing voice is bland and uneven on every page. That isn't helped at all by the string of random memories Fiona recalls of her father, which disrupt what’s an already clunky prose. My Father’s Words had potential.  It could’ve been a snapshot of precocious children coming of age. Potentially a moving and raw account of loss and healing. That potential is never met. 

If I didn’t receive an ARC of My Father’s Words I probably wouldn’t of bothered finishing it. Even though it’s only 130 pages it draaaaaags like a burlap sack loaded with dozens of dirt-covered potatoes being pulled across a floor. 

In the middle-grade genre (and beyond) My Father’s Words has absolutely nothing new to say. The only readers I can imagine getting anything out of this are the youngest of children. I’m talking second to fourth-grade elementary schoolers. Fifth-graders and beyond will surely be left unimpressed.

Not recommended.