"I'm not one of those guys who always planned on having kids," Will Allison confesses. "Of course, now that I'm a dad, I can hardly imagine a meaningful life for myself without my daughter in it. So being a parent has been both a mysterious and transformative experience, and one I can't seem to stop writing about." In his first novel, 2007's What You Have Left, Allison imagined a father and daughter reuniting years after he, consumed by grief after the death of his wife, abandoned her. Now, in Long Drive Home, he's back with the story of a dad with a desperate need to explain himself to his little girl.

Glen Bauer is taking his daughter home from school when a reckless teenage driver cuts them off, nearly causing a collision. When he sees the car again, he decides to teach the other driver a lesson, but inadvertently causes a crash that kills the teenager almost instantly. There are no other witnesses, so when the police ask what happened, Glen doesn't tell them about his role in the accident. And here's where the tensions begin: Will the investigators find out the truth? Will the dead boy's surviving family sue him for wrongful death? And how far will his wife go to protect the Bauers from being wiped out financially by a lawsuit?

Although the plot is compellingly taut, the novel's greatest strength may be Glen's narration, alternating between his account of how everything falls apart in the months following the accident and a letter he's writing for Sara to read when she turns eighteen.

"Developing Glen's voice was tricky," Allison says. "At the outset, he was funnier and more ironic, but given the particulars of the story, it just wasn't working. It seemed to me, on some level, like he didn't care that he'd killed someone else's child. The tone was all wrong. And so after a lot of trial and error, I arrived at a more measured and earnest voice."

It's that tone, which shifts from Glen's panicked grasps for something to blame for everything that's happened to him, to the eventual recognition and acceptance of his responsibility, that makes Will Allison's Long Drive Home a Character Approved read.

[Image: Lizzie Himmel]