#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From the award-winning, best-selling author of the classic A Little Life—a bold, brilliant novel spanning three centuries and three different versions of the American experiment, about lovers, family, loss and the ...
To Paradise was really a mixed bag for us. On the plus side, Yanagihara handles several elements of the novel very well. The worldbuilding of an alternate vision of the continental US and Hawaii that reimagines queer rights, colonialism, and pandemics was well handled; we were very ready for Yanagihara to miss the mark in the setting she was creating, but we all felt she did a very good job thinking through the setting and creating a believable world with gay marriage in the early 20th century and dystopian bureaucracies of disease control in the future. This final section about a quarantined and deeply constrained world was the strongest part of the story and all of liked the way that Yanagihara used a neurally divergent protagonist to both see the restrictions of NYC in the aftermath of a new pandemic as well as explore dreams of escape, the theme that the novel returns to over and over again. However, there are two sections before that final chapter, and that's a lot of text to get through given that all of the protagonists are people who either can't or won't take much action or make productive decisions. In particular, the second section in Hawaii is essentially a long description of people who choose to drop out of society and it's just a lot of time reading about people doing nothing but suffering from their own inertia and depression. Yanagihara can certainly write, but even pretty writing can't really save a story in which we watch people not act in their own most basic interests for so much time. No one loved or hated the novel, but whether anyone thought it was worth reading was a question of how much endurance they had for staying with such ineffectual protagonists. If you really like Yanagihara's style, you'll probably enjoy the good parts of this book, but be ready for a long slog in the middle of this one.