The Paragon Hotel by Lyndsay Faye

First Line: You're supposing that you hold in your hands a manuscript.

Suffering from an untended gunshot wound, former New York City resident Alice "Nobody" James is taken to Portland, Oregon's Paradise Hotel by Max, one of the black Pullman porters.

Her sanctuary turns out to be the only all-black hotel in the city, and its lodgers are none too happy about having a white woman on the premises. As she recuperates, she becomes acquainted with the residents and begins to understand why they dread her presence. The Ku Klux Klan has arrived in great numbers-- burning crosses, inciting violence, and brutalizing blacks. It's their presence that makes searching for a missing black child extremely difficult, but Alice insists on helping to find the boy.

The longer she stays, the more Alice learns. The Paragon Hotel is chockful of secrets, and nightclub singer Blossom Fontaine seems to be at the center of all of them.

In my travels east of the Mississippi, I'd often wondered at the proliferation of places called "Dew Drop Inn" or "Step Right Inn," mostly because there wasn't a thing about them that looked like an inn, hotel, motel, or bed-and-breakfast. All these places looked like bars or saloons to me. Well, thanks to Lyndsay Faye's The Paragon Hotel, I now know about the Raines law of 1896 and why so many bars and saloons changed their names. Other than this (and learning about Bayer's heroin tablets-- oh my), I found the book to be a mixed bag of blessings.

With sentences like "Losing a safe space...carves a canyon through a person," or "Watching like a sea captain's wife searching the shores after a storm," it's obvious that Faye certainly knows how to turn a memorable phrase. She also knows how to do her research on Harlem in New York City or the slang used in 1921 or Oregon's long association with racism. Memorable characters are also a forte. You've seldom met anyone like Alice James, who prefers to be called "Nobody," and the residents of the Paragon Hotel are fascinating, especially since they've all had to learn how to live a secretive life in a city (and state) where it is illegal for blacks to reside. You'd think that, with all those people in the hotel, you'd be constantly confused, but Faye effortlessly keeps them all straight in our minds.

The way the story is told is what tripped me up. This double-pronged tale is like two cats fighting in a bag. We have to be told Alice's backstory growing up poor in Harlem, and we have to be told the present-day story in Portland. It's too much. I could've done without all the backstory and having the sole focus be on the hotel and its residents. And the 1921 slang dialogue used throughout? While it's nice to know how many people spoke then, it was too much of a good thing even though I found none of it unintelligible. Like Alice's backstory, the slang served mainly to keep me from being drawn into the story-- and I really didn't want to be an outsider. Not at the Paragon Hotel.

There's an awful lot of good to be found in the pages of this book. If only I hadn't been put off by how the tale was put together. I seem to be in the minority with my opinion, so keep in mind that your mileage may definitely vary.

The Paragon Hotel by Lyndsay Faye

ISBN: 9780735210752

G.P. Putnam's Sons © 2019

Hardcover, 432 pages

Historical Thriller, Standalone

Rating: C+

Source: Purchased from The Poisoned Pen.


 

Scene of the Climb by Kate Dyer-Seeley

First Line: My fingernails dug into the soggy dirt as my body lurched closer to the sheer cliff face.

Unemployed journalist Meg Reed is camping out on her best friend's couch when she gets the opportunity to apply for a position at Northwest Extreme magazine there in Portland, Oregon. Lying through her teeth about her outdoor sports skills, she gets the job and eventually finds herself scrambling up steep trails to cover a reality TV adventure show.

Climbing a 2,000-foot mountain peak absolutely terrifies her, but when she witnesses someone plummet off the cliff, Meg discovers that she has a murder to investigate-- because the killer thinks Meg has seen too much.

This is the beginning of a new cozy series that shows a lot of promise. Meg is a good-hearted, and sometimes bumbling, young woman fresh out of college who's always wanted to follow in her talented father's shoes as an investigative journalist. Her best friend Jill has a nice apartment in Portland and is more than willing to put up with Meg's slovenly ways. There are suitable romantic interests for our heroine, and Dyer-Seeley has created a cast that should stand up well to future adventures even if it does contain my least favorite character-- the impossible mother.

The Portland setting with nearby sites and hiking trails made me want to go up there and experience it for myself. Scene of the Climb is a nice blend of the traditional cozy and an adventure with an edge to it, and the series should do well-- especially if a couple of things are addressed.

Meg being a couch potato who has to go out there and learn outdoor skills is going to have a wide appeal among readers; however, I found two of her behaviors to be rather disturbing. She doesn't seem to have a complete understanding of the word "deadline" although she certainly has time to go out for coffee or meals with her friends. This might just mean that I haven't fully recovered from being one of those Type A personalities, but the other thing well and truly drives me up a wall. Without going into too much detail, she knows that her life is in danger, but instead of exercising at least a bit of common sense and caution, Meg just keeps going out to test her luck.  Not. Good.

The other thing that bothered me is something I normally do not mention, but I feel I have to here. Incorrect punctuation a time or two, the wrong word in a sentence... if they happen less than five times in a book, I ignore it. But it happened over and over and over in this book. The proofreading and editing were abysmal. Countless instances of missing or extra words, "air" being used instead of "err," and a scene in which Meg was called first thing in the morning to meet someone who was an hour away. Meg left almost immediately, but as she was driving non-stop to her destination, the sun had set. 

As I said before, this series has a lot of promise. I'm hoping that Meg locates her common sense, and that the next book is edited more carefully because then the promise will begin to be realized.
 

Scene of the Climb by Kate Dyer-Seeley

ISBN: 9780758295316

Kensington © 2014

Mass Market Paperback, 299 pages

Cozy Mystery, #1 Pacific Northwest mystery

Rating: C+

Source: Purchased at The Poisoned Pen.