Just finished re-reading Hans Brinker, which, being a 19th-century children's novel, is full of moral and historical lessons and wild coincidences leading up to a triumphantly happy ending, yet in the midst of all of it sets before you this insight into the mind of a girl who struggles to love her father:
Gretel looked at her in troubled silence, wondering whether it were very wicked to care more for one parent than for the other, and sure—yes, quite sure—that she dreaded her father while she clung to her mother with a love that was almost idolatry.
Hans loves the father so well, she thought, why cannot I? Yet I could not help crying when I saw his hand bleed that day, last month, when he snatched the knife—and now, when he moans, how I ache, ache all over. Perhaps I love him, after all, and God will see that I am not such a bad, wicked girl as I thought. Yes, I love the poor father—almost as Hans does—not quite, for Hans is stronger and does not fear him . . . I don't want the poor father to die, to be all blue and cold like Annie Bouman's little sister. I KNOW I don't. Dear God, I don't want Father to die.
Of course, this being a book of its type, the dreaded father got that way through a brain injury while doing his job in difficult conditions, not through, for example, drinking steadily till he cared about nothing else. Still, lots of alcoholics' children must have read that and silently nodded.
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