A minister recalls the life of his father, a Mississippi fishing legend, in this debut family memoir.

Sunn grew up in the small town of Ackerman, Mississippi, in the 1960s. When he was 5, his parents divorced, and afterward, he mostly saw his father, James William “Moon” Sunn, on “sporadic weekends” whenever he was home from fishing the Kenai River in Alaska. Moon was intent on catching the “world record king salmon” and always believed that his next cast would hook him the prize. For many people of Ackerman, Moon was the “ ‘go-to’ guy” in any emergency, and Sunn tells tales of his heroics, such as saving a boy from drowning in a local lake. Such stories of Moon being “everyone else’s hero” run counter to the author’s feeling of disconnection from his dad. Sunn ably weaves in other elements of family history, recounting stories of his grandfather Mack Sunn relishing fishing and hunting before serving in World War I. At the close of the memoir, the author wrestles with the prospect of his aging father’s passing. Sunn’s portrait of his parent is engaging and wistfully poetic: “Moon is cut from a different cloth, and nothing can deter him from what he determines to do, whether death or life, angels or rulers, things present or things to come.” There are affecting, confessional moments when the author digs deep to reveal how he felt about his parents’ divorce: “Kids asked me sensitive questions like, ‘Do you live with your daddy or your momma?’ What that really meant was, ‘You’re not like us.’ ” Sunn also turns his attention to capturing the atmosphere of the American South and sometime offers gruesome details; following Mack’s heart attack, Sunn writes that the doctor “called for a hot iron….Before the days of defibrillators, apparently, hot irons were utilized in an attempt to jumpstart a dead heart.” The rapid-fire anecdotes result in a somewhat fragmented work, but there’s sufficient charm and intrigue in Sunn’s prose to overlook this. Overall, it’s a delightfully idiosyncratic debut.

A thoughtfully textured exploration of an unconventional father-son bond.