J. Hanson

I'm not sure why anyone would describe this as “silly.”

Beautiful, wonderfully gothic, a splendid ending. Exactly what I was looking for after reading The Turn of the Screw and Carmilla.

Anneliese is akin to Ann Lister. <3

Read it! (And someone make a movie of it, please.)

One of my favorite books to date.

Perfectly written, amazing research. Dr. Fuselier is like one of the coolest unsung heroes. Cullen provides history and answers to questions at the superb time. Inclusion of psychopathy was a brilliant and necessary move. I can see how the creation of this phenomenal book took so much of Cullen, but if he covers another case at some point, I will read that one, too, and tell everyone about it like I've done with this one. Truly dedicated, authentic, hard work and a truly amazing book.

Best book of the series...

Angels of Paradise arrives with an intriguing story: A new detainee navigates life as the only white woman in a Bahamian correctional facility, and finds unexpected solidarity with the women around her.

The setting itself is rendered with skill, placing us convincingly inside Fox Hill-- its layout, the rhythms of prison life, its tropical incongruities. That sense of place is the book's most refined and adept accomplishment.

The description of the book pledges a story about resilience, cross-cultural bonds, maternal love, and faith. These are compelling themes, and there are moments where the narrative earnestly reaches for them. Regrettably, the story is subverted by a consistent pattern of racial bias and condescension that goes completely unexamined. The problem is located largely in the narrator's perspective, which lacks the necessary critical distance to examine these biases.

The narrator explicitly dismisses the concept of white privilege while the narrative positions her as the most capable, most intelligent, most insightful, and most admirable. Similarly, the narrative strategically deploys multiple false accusations of racism against the narrator in moments where she is clearly innocent. This effectively inoculates her against the charge, and attempts to deflect from what’s actually happening elsewhere in the text.

“I didn’t understand their poor grammar and constant shouting. They didn’t know why I was so quiet and proper.” The Bahamian women who surround her at Fox Hill are rendered through a lens of unaddressed condescension, prisoners and guards alike. Their speech is characterized by poor grammar, they suffer from ‘generational curses,’ ‘bad habits,’ stupidity, constant shouting or 'improperness,’ and aggressiveness ("Most of the girls were far too aggressive for their own good. They were probably too masculine for their own good."). In addition, the prisoners exist only to be guided, corrected, or amazed by her, or to highlight the narrator's ‘goodness’. ‘"I walked over and examined her cornucopia of beautiful paints and tried to add value. “This looks great. But you know, if you take the gold paint and dust it on the tips… it will create this magical atmosphere in the chapel when the sun comes in through the windows,” I said. I grabbed her paintbrush and showed her exactly how it's done. “Wow, you're right,” she said. “How'd you learn to paint like this?” “I've been painting my whole life,” I said.’”

The narrative slides in moments of racial bias in a way that could be disregarded by an unsuspecting reader. “‘You racist?’ Pinder asked me. …‘No, I’m not, definitely not. I mean, we have lots of black Bahamian friends come over to the house all the time.’” And at other times, this is blatantly obvious. “The black guards all secretly wanted long, thick hair like mine, but that wasn’t realistic for them, given the rough, brittle, oily texture that naturally came with their genes.”

In other instances, the narrative dips into continued unreflective instances of sexism, lesbophobia, and misogyny: “All the female inmates at Fox Hill just wanted a rich man to take care of them when they got out, but they rarely thought about what they had to offer to men, and how being imprisoned or given a criminal record affected their prospects in the dating market.”

These elements as a whole would be troubling in any book. However, in one explicitly framed around solidarity across differences, it undermines its own intentions. A story cannot credibly celebrate women whom it disparages.

The writing itself is accessible, lucid, sometimes vivid, and the author's ability to portray the physical space and sense of captivity robustly serves the story. Ultimately, Angels of Paradise exhibits its narrator's unexamined prejudices more carefully than it underscores the women at its margins.