28223107To give it to you straight? It was a bit of a mindfudgery. Paul Southern has a knack for taking humanity and presenting it on a truth-colored torture tool with a dash of added realism and gag-reflex inducing details. I also blame PMS’ing, the abundance of empathy trolling around rent free in my nervous system and the acrobatic powers of this author’s writing genie.

Paul Southern, with the opening sentence of Daddy Dearest gripped my heart in his skillful writing hands and squeezed with iron grip until the last page. And there was some funny bits in there too… Like, wtf. Like the part with Miss Saigon and talking to pregnant stomachs.. I swear I was laughing so hard… Or maybe I was just losing it, because it all made me so confused… not because I didn’t know what was happening but because I didn’t know how to perceive the characters! I felt as tired as a highway whore with 20 years of service under the belt.

Daddy Dearest is an experience of a slow burn of new revelations, new truths with every chapter. As you keep turning the pages you get to know more and more about each character. As you keep turning the pages you become to hate the ones you love, and love the ones you hate… No, scratch that- I don’t think I had any love for anyone in this book. Not the adults anyway. What I had was pity and pain and a lot of “Why?”‘s

So, let’s have a little chat about the Daddy Dearest himself… There isn’t much I can say without giving away the whole storyline- there really were endless opportunities and endless chances of everything turning out completely differently… until you reach the end. Anyway, I’m confused about the man. So friggin confused… I pity him, I hate him, and with pity you want to protect him because we all have had our share of pain and loneliness and bad decisions next to selfless/selfish acts and I can’t blame him the thoughts he had (which can be related or totally unrelated to the story at hand, up to you) no matter how gross they were at times. But I dig it… I scoop up the shit portrayed in novels, because it’s the extreme that makes me tick. Books are art and anything is possible. Whether we can stomach it is a different story. And our thoughts and actions can only be tamed by ourselves. Well done Paul Southern, you wrote the whole world with it’s good and bad and evil and innocent into one book.

I do recommend checking this book out. It will make you question people, and at times it will test the boundaries of what is and isn’t acceptable in your mind.

Rating: 5 stars!

Daddy Dearest will be published on June 1st- that’s in a couple of days, peeps! Go grab your copy now and dive into the ugly and the beautiful…

Links to pre-order “Daddy Dearest”

Amazon UK — Amazon USA — Smashwords

Paul Southern on:

Goodreads — Twitter — Website

 

Also check out this great author interview with Paul