Dreamer’s Daughter: Surviving My Childhood and Raising My Father

A pair of explosions bookend this amusing debut memoir from Canadian philanthropist Thicke. In 1972, when Thicke was 14, she and her brother returned to their Ontario farmhouse with their father, Dacker, only to find it burned to the ground after he let the fire insurance lapse. “Well kids,” he responded, “now we’re free!” Over a decade later, Dacker triggered an accidental gas explosion in his motor home, then commented only that his face would look “as smooth as a baby’s bottom” when he healed. In between conflagrations, Thicke chronicles growing up mostly under Dacker’s loving but absentminded care after her parents’ divorce. The family’s financial security relied mostly on the success of his harebrained moneymaking schemes, including selling scrap metal and inventing a machine to capture gold particles that slip through sieves. As exasperating—and occasionally harrowing—as her early years often were, Thicke nonetheless captures her father’s soft heart: when she was an adult, her best friend died in a plane crash, and her mother hesitated to make a short trip to console her, while Dacker flew immediately to her side from Hawaii. Compassionate, poignant, and surprising, this is a welcome addition to the shelf of memoirs about complicated parent-child bonds. Agent: Mollie Glick, CAA. (Apr.)