31 Paradiso A Novel

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Description

When Francine Ephesians Didwell loses the love of her life, she is forced to reconnect with her estranged family. She's led two lives up until now, one with her evangelical charismatic family, and another of emancipated rebellion with her lover. Bereaved, Francine relocates to 1990s Venice Beach to start life over. She struggles to make a living doing massages and managing her new real estate of bread-and-butter units in hell. The novel moves between Francine's new home and her family estate just fifty miles inland where, hoping to reconnect, Francine discovers she must confront the truth about dark family secrets or lose herself in the suicidal world of drugs. To her great good luck, throughout her journey, she is assisted and supported by her other family: the yodeler, the sex worker, the local burglar who has taken up residence outside her window, and all the imperfect characters from the mean streets of Venice Beach. Hilarious and painful, Francine's life force and her thirst for freedom illuminate every page.

Reviews

". . . moving . . . resonant. . . .Huffeys novel ventures into surprisingly imposing emotional territory."
31 Paradiso is so filled with energy, the pages fairly crackle. A story of revelations, told with enormous vim and vigor, pain and wisdom, wit and wildness, (and also, shuffles and heel rolls.) The first great American tap-dancing novel!
I think Rhoda Huffey has invented a whole new kind of narrative prose. Each sentence is an unforeseeable surprise. Shes got a new way of tracking how it feels to be a living person, minute-to-minutein particular how it feels to be this person Francine Didwell, fresh-arrived in Venice Beach, California. To live in Venice is, itself, wonderfully distracting. But its super-distracting just being Francine Didwell, a tap dancer and a philosopher and a perpetual pilgrim, who, in her gypsy life in a beach town, will survive on her own inner stores of compassion and irony.

Author Bio

Rhoda Huffey is a tap dancer and writer. She grew-up in Ames, Iowa until she was 10, then moved to Monrovia, CA (in Los Angeles County). She lives in Venice Beach, CA with her husband and a houseful of rescue animals. She received an MFA from the University of California at Irvine. She has published a novel, The Hallelujah Side, and short stories in numerous magazines including Ploughshares, Green Mountains Review, and Santa Monica Review. The daughter of two Pentecostal preachers, Huffey writes about a world she knows with sympathy and feeling.