Paradise - Hardcover

"The best way to get where you want to be is to please those who own the road," warns ten-year-old Solita's mother, Pilar. Pilar, a dispossessed aristocrat who escaped Franco's Spain with Julian, Solita's exciting labor-lawyer father, wants a change. Tired of living as an unemployed refugee in a run-down neighborhood in a crowded city in Chile, she is ecstatic when she finds people who do indeed own a road going where she wants to be: Paradise. And paradise, an estate called El Topaz owned by "important people" with children Solita can make "lasting and lifelong friendship with," is where Solita, her younger brother, and their mother go. This paradise is full of bored aristocrats, quirky animals who "smell normal," servants with personalities, and children who endlessly measure everything about everybody. For Solita, used to hand-me-down clothes, one pair of panties with rotten elastic, and her mother's constantly smiled reminder "when in Rome...," Paradise is full of road-blocks, secrets, sometimes thrilling dangers, and an unending longing to return home to her father. We feel the world Solita feels in colorful, sweet, and gory detail. And with her we learn about choosing the people and the roads we follow. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Jesse Larsen

A lavish, decadent country estate in an unnamed Latin American country, Paradise is here viewed through the eyes of Solita, a little girl whose family has fled Franco's Spain. Solita, a keen observer who does not always understand what she observes, describes the three cruel and spoiled daughters of the estate; the wild assortment of degenerate grown-ups, from a constipated psychiatrist to a Salome-like dancer with raccoon eyes; and the unforgettable menagerie, which includes a tame guanaco, Jali the pet goat, and the dogs Gin, Tonic, Vodka, and Coca Cola. The novel is both startling and charming. Like Solita, Castedo was born in Spain; she grew up in Chile and now lives in the United States.
- Mary Margaret Benson, Linfield Coll. Lib., McMinnville, Ore.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.