Raising Father

About the Book

Max, a gifted artist and mentally challenged father of twin girls, faces life without his wife and anchor after her death from cancer. Evelyn, his soul mate, a woman given to equal simplicity and passion, and a model of normalcy in a home with high school girls, leaves a legacy of caring leadership that is suddenly threatened. Unable to accept his wife’s passing as anything but depression, he lapses into the classic symptoms of his condition, and presents his daughters and extended family with the question of how to preserve that legacy and their family intact.

The family draws nearer despite their unique differences. After much personal and legal wrangling, Max returns to his former self at the brink of his twins’ first prom night, a life that was hidden in plain sight, the vision reminiscent of his own chance meeting with their mother.

The travel of this family, not unlike so many in an unpredictable world, helps forge a model of leadership, in and outside the home, whose compelling nature may be the cause célèbre of a world in search of meaning.

About the Author

Frank J. Rich is a practitioner in the field of performance improvement, and founder and CEO of organizational development company encore prÍst international. He lives with his wife and children in New York. He has published more than 200 articles on performance improvement, and more than 200 poems, literary letters, short stories, a political irony cartoon strip, and the better part of another fictional novel. The idea for this book (Raising Father) came to him in a moment of reflection on the nature of the human condition under stress. Given to thought on the fundamentals of human behavior, and its elemental hopefulness, he imagined the course of a family in the wake of tragedy. The writing is thoughtful and intuitive, and reveals the ethic behind decisions and the heart behind the ethic. The telling of this story, as is common to most storytellers, is the accumulated expression of so many of the pennies held closely in his own thought bank. Perhaps, he also imagined that little more was necessary to complete it than to put it to paper. And so the story was written into existence. frankrich@aol.com