This is a fascinating concept and I love these kinds of stories. Due to time, I will not be giving a full review. However, I’m sure this book is a match for many people.

Thanks to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for my opinion.

This book was an absolute struggle from page one. The descriptions of everything were all run-on sentences that were impossible to wrap my brain around. I had to give up at the end of chapter one because I just couldn't focus with all of the excessive details in there.

3.5*

I had high hopes for this book and was mildly disappointed when the story line seemed to veer off from what the blurb anticipated. I was drawn to a lot of the characters that we were introduced to and was left wanting to hear more about their lives with one another and their moving away from paradise valley following its closure.

I am a lifelong Southerner, except for the several years I lived in the Detroit suburbs and then Chicago; it was interesting to get a perspective on this city that I spent so much time in, so many years after the time-frame of this work, when it is so comfortable in it's state of urban decay that it's almost impossible to imagine it any other way.
"They are the waitresses with sore feet hustling trays of food through a maze of tables. They are the clerical workers tapping away madly on typewriters amidst a ringing chorus of telephones. They are the custodians mopping floors, their ears buzzing from the hum of a whirring vacuum cleaner. And these are just a sample of the workers that make up this great working city.
They are Detroit."
Set to a chorus of R&B and Jazz appropriate to the time and showcasing the black business owners who thrived there, and the way that everyone in the area was a family, the texture and the layers of this story make me sorry that this is a Detroit I will never see in my lifetime, although echoes of the kindness and the "we're all a family" essence are alive and well long after segregation and hatred forever changed the way that this section of the city existed, and continues to exist to this day.
Fraught with the racial tension that still plagues Detroit and painted amid a vibrant background that has since faded to a tired grey, this 2017 novel by Thomas Galasso is an especially loving tribute to a city that gives it the heart, the beauty, and the grit that is so representative of the people who make their homes there.
Beautiful.

It's been a challenge to rate this book. I loved the atmosphere and the historical setting of the book but struggled through dialogue heavy chapters that dragged on.