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

In her first novel, Casteda, who was raised in Chile, recreates the magical world of a group of South American aristocrats just after WW II, but diminishes the charm of her tale by dragging it on too long. The narrator, a lively youngster named Solita, lives in poverty in an unnamed Latin American country where her parents are political refugees from Franco's Spain. While her father dabbles in radical politics, her mother, a renowned beauty, tries to better her family's status by hobnobbing with wealthy eccentrics. One of them, "Tia" Merce, a bisexual fond of Solita's mother, invites the family to her lush country estate, El Topaz. Among Merce's three spoiled daughters, Solita begins an education in the ways of the upper classes. Merce's constant stream of guests, their chatter and their pretensions are vividly conveyed; Solita's naive, highly accurate descriptions of her elders are often riotously funny. The novel ends with a tragic murder and a resulting loss of innocence for all the children.
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