You Don't Love This Man: A Novel

At the start of DeWeese's engaging debut, Paul, a bank manager in the Pacific Northwest, loses his three-year-old daughter, Miranda, for a short time while trick-or-treating. After Miranda disappears 22 years later, on the day of her wedding, Paul begins a series of increasingly frustrating attempts to locate and talk with her. Unable to read relationship cues, Paul is often surprised or angered by the actions of those he thinks he knows well, including his now ex-wife, Sandra, and Grant, a friend who became his daughter's intended without his awareness. Paul's bank is robbed on the day of the wedding by the same man who robbed it two decades earlier, which adds to the trauma and confusion. Essentially decent, caring, and loyal, Paul is more valued than he suspects. Paul learns some valuable lessons as he retraces and re-evaluates his life in this insightful novel. (Mar.)
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With deep compassion and wry humor, DeWeese examines the intricacies of fatherhood, friendship, and happenstance in his stylistically uneven first novel. Hours before Paul's daughter Miranda is to marry his best friend, Paul receives news that someone has robbed the bank he manages in a Pacific Northwest city. But Paul is more concerned that neither he nor anyone else has been able to contact Miranda all day. To make matters worse, he discovers that the robber is the same man who held him up 25 years earlier at the same bank, an incident that has given Paul the one worthwhile story of his life to tell. As Paul's day proves increasingly more complicated, he reevaluates his tumultuous past, including the coincidental bank robberies and his relationships with his daughter, ex-wife, current girlfriend, and best friend, who is soon to become his son-in-law. While Paul's narration is at times heartfelt and wise, DeWeese's prose is often clunky and distracting, leaving the otherwise admirable story feeling forced. --Jonathan Fullmer