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Apr 20, 2019booknrrd rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
The Paragon Hotel is about a young woman on the run from her past who takes the train from New York to Portland with 2 bullets in her. An African American porter sees that she needs help and takes her to a "blacks only" hotel that he knows about in Portland where she can get treated on the down low. The only problem is that she's white, and apparently Portland is super racist. In between chapters Faye teaches us about Portland and Oregon's racist past. For example, African Americans by law were not allowed to settle in Oregon between 1844 and the end of the Civil War, and Oregon today only has a 2% African American population. Anyway, in the novel, the KKK has come to town, and although their rhetoric is "America first" it has the non-white population on edge. Meanwhile Alice James, our heroine, is recuperating at the Paragon Hotel and making friends with some of the inhabitants. We gradually learn her backstory and there's a missing persons case that has everyone upset. What is really going on? This was really good. I liked all the storylines set in Portland. For me the New York storyline was by far the weakest, and I could have lived without it. The characters are great. I can tell that Lyndsay Faye cares about her characters and wants us to think about what kind of world we want to live in, and that's the kind of book by the kind of author that I want to read.