PARADISE HIGH

A tongue-in-cheek novella that takes young love and teen angst to a higher power.

Teenager Michael Night is 10,000 years old—a bit long in the tooth to be a normal teen but not a teen angel. A former nerd, Michael made some changes in order to hang out with the “cool kids” and is a warrior-in-training at the Academy of Attack & Defend. When God tunes his flat screen TV (“a gift from Steve Jobs”) to the Earth station, he is disappointed and disgusted at what he sees—war, greed, corruption, hate, Duck Dynasty and Honey Boo Boo—and he decides to do something about it. So, God instructs Michael to annihilate Earth. Without batting an eye, Michael accepts his mission. Arriving in the laid-back beach community of Paradise, California, Michael isn’t prepared for what happens next: Shelly Bloom. Shelly is the most beautiful 16-year-old that Michael has ever seen. As his love for Shelly grows, his desire to obliterate the world wanes, and Michael begins to feel the pull of an emotion he has never before experienced—empathy. Michael soon learns that life isn’t as one dimensional as he thought. Aaron’s debut novella keeps things light with a humorous voice, yet it has a serious message to deliver—the value of humility and the danger of judging others without truly knowing them or their plights. Adding to the joviality is the narrator’s stance that humans thrive on “perception” and must be able to relate abstract concepts to tangible things—and obliges the reader by providing a face to put with the name; therefore, heaven looks like Park City, Utah, and God looks like Russell Crowe. Aaron has penned a fun satirical take on the state of our world and the often single-minded view of humans in regard to themselves, others and what it means to live life to the fullest.

An engaging tale highlighting the fragility and the puerility of the human condition.