As Hell Creek High School finally integrates in 1967, Curtis Pye, a fifteen-year-old sophomore of indeterminate race, is hyper-literate, the smartest kid, has already read a quarter of books in the library, and befriends the first black girl to transfer into his high school.
However, he falls hopelessly, hormonally, despairingly infatuated with the prettiest girl, O'Murphy Scott. Curtis doesn't act on his desire. Murph is a flirt, but every time she isn't with Scooter Anderson, her thuggy boyfriend assumes she's with Curtis. Although Scooter and his brothers, Spit and Pickle, pick a disastrous fight with Curtis, he's ordered not to return to school.
After a fight with his brother, Curtis swallows a bottle of aspirin. Suicide fails, so Curtis hitchhikes to California, where he hopes to find his ex-Marine father and learn how to fight. Along that seventeen-hundred-mile odyssey, Curtis sleeps in trucks, in a ditch, on a rooftop, takes care of himself, and learns from dozens of mentors, including truck drivers, a college student and a soldier. Hippies on their way to the Summer of Love direct Curtis to Palo Alto. Curtis doesn't know his father's address, so he waits at the post office box and hopes each day his father, whom he hasn't seen in six years, will come for his retirement check.
Curtis finds a temporary home, acceptance and friends at Full Circle, a communal cafe in Palo Alto where he can work for meals and a place to sleep. Curtis also meets Brother Love, a postal worker, street preacher and psychologist who completes Curtis's education and arms him emotionally to finish his hero's journey, fight his own battles and understand his life.
Curtis finds nothing he sought in California, but instead discovers his own courage, independence, confidence and redemption. Months after he left, Curtis, who thought he was the most invisible boy in high school, returns to Oklahoma and finds Spit and Scooter have been abusing and assaulting O'Murphy. He fights the Andersens, earns Murph's respect, and finally reconciles with Biggy.
All this sounds dark and edgy, but it's also seriously funny.
The themes of To Daddy, Who I Never Loved, are universal: everyone has daddy issues or mommy problems or sibling rivalries. One in three younger siblings are so successfully bullied by older brothers or sisters, they become meek and are harassed at school. Other themes include the 1960s, teen love, coming of age, mistaken identity, religion, hope, redemption, and the responsibility to help others.
Warning: themes of suicide, violence, bullying, sexual molestation, parental abandonment, rejection, self-harm, racism, and lovemaking. Several scenes may upset or offend some readers.
Like The Catcher in the Rye, this debut novel is not YA; To Daddy, Who I Never Loved, is a young adult-literary-historical smashup. It is child-in-jeopardy lit, and it is a coming-of-age story narrated by a voice that readers can't stop thinking about. To Daddy, Who I Never Loved won a Florida Writers Association's Royal Palms Literary Award for historical novels in 2018.
Gary Robert Pinnell is a retired journalist who worked with thirteen newspapers in seven states. This is his first novel.