Customer Reviews

Love, Dad

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The first time I read this book (and many times after during the same time period) I was in my late teens to early 20's. Back then, I loved it so I was excited to find it on Amazon and buy a copy of a book I remembered enjoying. I have a thing for novels that portray parts of history and while I was born in the mid 60's I don't REMEMBER the 60's so it is an era I am fascinated with. Thus, I loved reading a fictional account of one young girls attendance at Woodstock and the roving hippie life she was leading. It was exciting to put myself in her place and travel to distant exotic lands even though even back then she struck me as rather self centered and bratty. While I couldn't identify with the father at that age, I thought he seemed like a cool guy and I sympathized with the issues he had with his daughter.

Now however, reading this again in my mid 40's, it was much harder to get into. I had a hard time empathizing or even LIKING any of the characters in this book. Lissie is a spoiled rotten brat with entitlement issues. Jamie, the father, is a cheating self centered whiner who justifies his philandering and attitude with the old adage of just having grown apart form his wife and she doesn't excite him anymore. The woman Jamie gets involved with is simply a slightly older version of Jamie's daughter. Even the neighbors are portrayed as a stereotype of 60's swinging couples and there didn't seem to be a happy marriage or family in sight. About the only character I could even somewhat feel for was Jamies wife and a young girl in the book who ends up killing herself.

The book isn't horrible by any means. But neither is it great. The characters are fairly unlikable and the only thing that kept me reading was the plot-line surrounding the characters; world in turmoil, kids staging their own revolt against authority, 60's culture and the view of the world through the eyes of a young traveler. If you enjoy those ideas, get this one. If however, you want a book that has characters you can identify with and feel for, you will be annoyed at this book and the people in it and I suggest you look elsewhere.

This is the story of the breakdown of a father-daughter relationship set against the backdrop of the 1960s. On the surface, Melissa "Lissie" Croft is a lawless brat, a vulgar upper-class hippie who tests her relationship with her wealthy photographer father Jamie with increasing severity until he is left with no choice but to cut her off. But there is more to it than that: there are unhealthy Electral overtones to the relationship, which seems to drive the plot. Jamie's marriage to Lissie's mother Connie falls apart pretty much in tandem with his relationship with Lissie. Once sheltered, she expands her personal experience to the limit, going to Woodstock I, hitchhiking across the country from New York to California, then Europe and Asia, all the way to India and back, hooking up with lowlife men, experimenting with drugs. Jamie's new wife Joanna is not much older than Lissie and bears a striking physical resemblance to her, and Lissie seems to be doing more than just growing up: she seems to be reacting strongly against her father's unhealthy feelings toward her, and he doesn't seem to get it.

At one point, Lissie gets her drink spiked at her father's wedding to Joanna, forcing him to devote his wedding night to nursing his daughter through her involuntary intoxication. This, it seems, is punishment from her druggie so-called friends for not using every drug that becomes available to her. I have never heard of any episode of this kind occurring in real life: no stoner I've ever heard of would do this sort of thing, except in fiction where the writer wants to convey an anti-drug message (such as the spurious "diary" Go Ask Alice).