Beautiful cover, intriguing characters and a story line with grit and gusto. My first Lyndsay Faye novel and I am hooked!

I’m judicious with 5 star ratings, but this was a no brainer. Lyndsay Faye has written a meticulously researched, intriguing, heart-wrenching novel that doesn’t shy away from our country’s difficult past. Narrated by “Nobody,” a grifter who can tailor her person to the situation/society group, we’re brought along on her (bullet-induced) flight from the Mafia-ridden streets of Harlem out to the unfettered frontier land of Portland, Oregon. When a young boy goes missing from her refuge at the all-black Paragon Hotel, Nobody is thrust into a battle between the races, a fight for what she believes in, and a struggle to escape the horrors of her past.
I straight up devoured this novel. Faye’s character development in this novel is effortless, and Blossom and Nobody are women that I lived with while reading this book. The incorporation of horrifying real-life quotations from documents, newspapers and people of the time consistently remind readers that everything on these fictional pages are grounded in a very real past of our country.
I can’t recommend this book highly enough. Can not wait to give copies to this historical fiction fans in my life.
I received this book from NetGalley - courtesy of Penguin Random House - in exchange for an honest review. taylorhavenholt.com/thhbooks.html

Oregon has a history of discrimination against people of color. Three infamous “exclusion laws” banned blacks, passed in 1848, 1850, and 1857, as Oregon sought to become a state; it even wrote the exclusion of blacks into its constitution.

As the Washington Post reports:

"Oregon is the only state in the United States that actually began as literally whites-only,” said Winston Grady-Willis, director of Portland State University’s School of Gender, Race and Nations. 'Even though there was subsequent legislation that challenged those statutes, the statutes were not removed from the books until 1922.’”

In the 1920s, Oregon had the largest KKK organization [per capita] west of the Mississippi River.

This history forms the backdrop for Lyndsay Faye’s latest historical fiction/crime novel, which is set in Portland, Oregon in 1921. As with her previous historical fiction books, each chapter is preceded by actual excerpts of writings from that period which are germane to the action, adding a great deal of insight into what the atmosphere was like at the time.

Alice James, 25, a “ward” of an Italian mob boss in Harlem, has reason to flee for her life, and gets on a train going west. By the time she gets to Portland, Oregon, she is in mortal danger from a festering gunshot wound. The black porter, Max Burton, takes her to the Paragon Hotel in the city for treatment. The Paragon Hotel [patterned after Portland’s historic Golden West Hotel] is the only hotel in Portland where people of color are allowed, and because Max has to touch Alice to help her - indeed, he has to carry her - he can’t very well show up with her at a white place lest he be lynched. The denizens of the hotel put her in a room and get their doctor to stitch her up.

Before long, Alice feels she has new friends and a new “family” of sorts. But the wonderful cast of characters who live and work at the hotel are harboring a slew of secrets, which come oozing out of the woodwork after a little boy who lives at the hotel goes missing. Blacks can’t safely comb the surrounding woods without risking being part of a Ku Klux Klan bonfire, and most of the police won’t protect them. On the contrary, they need protection from the police.

As the chapters go back and forth in time, we also learn about Alice’s past in mob-ruled Harlem. Her life was dangerous in both places, but she has attributes that help her survive in both.

The story ends with a wonderful “It’s just Chinatown” coda as Alice finally leaves the Paragon Hotel:

“…the Paragon Hotel spits me out, I turn to look back at it. Its dozens of windows with its hundreds of guests, all of them hiding something. All of them fighting for something. All of them frightened of something. That’s the kicker about hotels - they aren’t homes, they’re more like the paragon of waiting rooms. … you burrow underneath one another’s surfaces, air the cupboards, life the drapes, and everyone is unhappy, and everyone is searching, and everyone is both cruel and kind.”

Discussion: There are wonderful aspects to this story, not the least of which are bits of historical information provided by the author. Her language, too, is lovely, as she veers from the slang of the time to more dazzling and timeless prose, such as these descriptions of the vistas in Portland, so different from what she grew up with in Harlem:

“The skies are enormous, flung open and sprawling. A bucket of spilled cerulean.”

“I took a streetcar in the salmon sunrise…”

Even the horrific is at times couched in eloquence, as she muses about how the blacks in Portland might think about death, and is reminiscent of the song “Strange Fruit,” sung so movingly by Billie Holiday:

“Wondering when their own time comes, whether they’ll drift up to heaven from their warm beds or from the cool rustling of strange tree branches.”

When she sees a sliver of the moon it makes her think about the secrets she carries, and the secrets carried by everyone she has met,

“The moon has risen, slender and delicate. Seeming awfully small. But that’s the trick about the moon… that doesn’t mean the rest of the moon isn’t there. Only that it’s waiting for the right time to be visible. Showing sharp white sickles of itself until suddenly it’s flooding wheat fields and coastlines, shocking everyone over how much was hidden all that while.”

The theme of a paragon, or exemplar, enters in the story in several ways, most notably in Alice’s “salute” at the end of the book:

“So here’s to the saps and the sinners. To survival of the fittest and the terribly unfit. To the paragon of animals in all our many forms. . . . .”

Rating: This is another terrific book by this author. (I can’t think of one that hasn’t been excellent.) Highly recommended!

A beautifully written story of people just trying to lead their lives under very difficult and trying circumstances. In 1921 Alice "Nobody" is fleeing Harlem with a bullet wound in her side a bag of counterfeit bills when African American porter Max helps her find refuge in the Paragon Hotel for traveling African Americans in Portland. Part mystery and part historical fiction this is a real page turner that lingers in your mind long after the book is finished.

Long time fan of Lyndsay Faye, and this book certainly did not disappoint. She has a way of taking a time period, or a group that you've read about a thousand times and shedding light on new facets of the stories. Each character is carefully crafted, and memorable; each location is so real you can practically smell them. If you are a fan of reading about humanity in all its glory and all its shame, this should top your to-be-read list.