Gender, Race, and Power
Paradise takes place in Ruby, an all-Black town controlled by domineering patriarchal systems, and the characters’ experiences with race and gender are inextricably linked. The story moves through time to explore the background of the book’s beginning: nine of the town’s most influential men murder the residents of the Convent, where independent women have formed a small community. This violence is the culmination of the subtler, less physical forms of violence that Ruby’s patriarchy…
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Community
Paradise centers around two communities at odds with each other: the conservative and patriarchal township of Ruby, and the free-thinking sisterhood of women at the Convent. The development of these communities at once reflects and influences the characters’ development. The community in the Convent is fractured for much of the story; Mavis and Gigi dislike each other upon their first meeting, and the other women are too preoccupied with their own troubles to ease…
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Motherhood and Intergenerational Trauma
Paradise is a story about women and their relationships, and many characters specifically struggle with motherhood. The mothers in the book are deeply flawed, grappling with a desperate love for their children that they do not know how to act upon—and in most cases, the mothers’ inability to act upon their love for their children is due to unresolved trauma in their own lives. Mavis is a mother who chooses to leave her children. She…
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Change vs. Tradition
The town of Ruby is steeped in traditions, and burgeoning challenges to those traditions incite conflict. This conflict centers around The Oven. The Oven is the heart of Ruby, a remnant of the town’s predecessor Haven that serves as a community space. The town’s forefathers engraved a message on the Oven that has faded with time, so it simply reads “…the Furrow of His Brow.” Tradition holds that the original engraving read “Beware the…
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God, Holiness, and Faith
Most characters in Paradise are devout Christians, and the book’s instances of magical realism frequently connect to the faith of the characters involved. The presence of magic in the story establishes that some version of God exists, but Paradise never clarifies what this God intends or what form holiness might take. The Convent is a safe place for women, and Connie, its leader, retains the Christian values of the nuns who once lived there…
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Exclusion
Ruby, the primary setting of Paradise, is a town dependent on isolation and the exclusion of perceived outsiders. The men who founded Ruby’s predecessor, Haven, walked there with their families. Along the way, they stopped at another all-Black town for shelter, but the residents rejected the travelers for being too dark-skinned. The travelers refer to this event as “the Disallowing,” and it fundamentally shapes the way that Haven––and later Ruby––functions. In response to the…
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