Dude.

Bad enough for you?

Yup, people are people…but mothers and fathers aren’t just a matter of biology and good intentions or even good years. It’s the deep to the bone ability to do right by your children that makes you a good person and a good parent… And to acknowledge that choosing to do right by yourself is the best message you can give your child. How else will they learn to do right for themselves? To value themselves and their parents with authenticity…by example.

What is that old sampler I remember from my childhood? “Children learn what they see.”

Ivy knows, all the way to her bones, that Helen’s father is a monster. As old as the instinct to flee from the sabertooth, she knows this. And for the sake of her daughter, she’ll sacrifice any chance to have a relationship with her daughter to save her daughter from the monster inside him.

And she is right. I’ll make that plain. And have Helen mourn the father she knew as a child… Trust me.

Not having typical characters can be good and bad. After all, you have characters that don’t blend with everyone else; and people certainly can’t say they’re cliche or like every other character they’ve ever read. But then having untypical characters also means they’re far more likely to behave outside the accepted human reaction or experience so you have your work cut out for you making the reader stay for the duration of the story.

You also run the risk of having a smaller audience of “approval”–if that bothers you as a writer. For example, there is a larger audience for the heroine who loves children and rescues orphans. It is a much smaller audience who empathizes with the heroine who doesn’t really like kids and it shows.

It doesn’t mean if your audience is smaller, your story is not as good, by any means.

And I agree with Hells, that if a girl’s a daddy’s girl and all her experiences with her dad are good, she might be able to see that he isn’t a “good” guy but still love him for who he was to her.