My big question here is this: did Sanford and Green come up with this idea on their own, or is it in the original script for the 1943 film and was removed in final editing? On the one hand, Sanford and Green are writing for a child audience, and it's possible that they thought that a romantic motivation for the Phantom might be either too adult or too unrelatable for children, who would more easily understand the idea of a parent wanting to take care of his daughter. By abandoning her (and Christine, throughout the book, is never told that the Phantom is her father, even after he's dead), the original novel's dynamic of Christine as an orphan is preserved while the Phantom's role as surrogate father-figure is made a literal reality. Enrique apparently abandoned Christine and her mother while the child was still in infancy though this is never exactly explained, it can be inferred that his flight to be a single violinist at the opera may parallel Christine's refusal to be tied down to a life outside her musical career. I have no idea why they added the "n" to the film's "Erique", unless there was some overzealous editor who thought they'd spelt it wrong, but for some reason they've chosen to change it to the French form of Henry instead of Erik) was actually his protege's biological father. Yeah, there are abundant father issues in the original novel and in most of its progeny, but there has never yet been a version in which Erik (or, in this case, Enrique. The very unexpected choice for this book, which is an idea that I haven't seen before in any Phantom literature yet, is this: the Phantom is Christine's biological father.
The writers, in their prologue (not much of a prologue, really more of a foreword), claim to have based the text entirely on the original script for the film, which was written by Eric Taylor and Samuel Hoffenstein. Talk about things you weren't expecting! As you can probably tell from Claude Rains up there, this is a little novelization for children based on the 1943 Lubin/Rains film, with various still shots from the film (including, I think, a few that didn't actually make it into the final cut of the movie).
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