31 PARADISO

A woman moves to Venice Beach to escape her controlling family.

For a book that opens with an event dubbed “the Great Duck Massacre of 1993,” Huffey’s novel ventures into surprisingly imposing emotional territory. At its center is Francine Ephesians Didwell, a woman who’s recently moved to Venice Beach. (And, in fact, that year did see dozens of ducks hunted and killed to keep a virus from spreading.) Francine’s reasons for moving there have to do with grief: Her paramour, Cyrus, died before the book opens, and she remains haunted by his memory. Her relationship with him also helped to distance her from her very religious family, described as “a cult of two parents and three siblings.” Francine has other reasons for wanting to stay away from her family, especially her father—who, we eventually learn, is capable of horrific acts. In the aftermath of Cyrus’ death, Francine finds that she’s returned to her family’s orbit even as she bonds with her new neighbors and attempts to find her own passions—including a love of tap dancing, sparked by a Gregory Hines performance. The most moving parts of this novel are when Huffey describes Francine having to stifle aspects of her truest self when around her family: “From now on, while in the Holy City of Monrovia she must always be a good Didwell, and pretend to go to church, and never mention the name of Cyrus, and honor Mr. Didwell’s status: perfect as God is perfect.” It’s at these moments when the book is most resonant. The tonal shifts between the comic and the harrowing are jarring at times, but Huffey’s empathy for her protagonist is tangible.

A tonally uneven trip back to a bygone Californian age.