| Popis: |
Corner of Paradise is a fiction novel formatted as a collection of short stories linked by protagonist Evangeline Porter. These coming-of-age stories highlight critical events in the life of this Black-Latinx woman spanning 1984 thru 2020. This work of historical fiction weaves a nuanced family drama, loosely based on the author’s life, with the ’80s New York City cultural explosion of music and nightlife, as well as its implosion from AIDS, Reaganomics, and the crack cocaine epidemic. One of Eva's tale's central and recurring settings is the world-renowned Paradise Garage. More than a dance club, it was a community, a haven for the Black and Brown LGBTQ communities from 1979-1987. This setting is where Eva meets Angel and embarks on a fateful love affair that leads to her greatest joys, undoing and reckoning with herself. Corner of Paradise explores themes of family love, grief, inequality, criminal life, regret, choices, and consequences. This novel-in-stories uses multiple narrators with shifts in POV and tense to reveal the protagonist’s tale. Eva’s story begins with her father's tragic death, which emotionally whirls her into a lifetime of wrong turns. The denouement is a reckoning of those choices played out in 2020 at the onset of the Covid pandemic, a last stand, the chance to save herself and set her life right. |
