Olivia Dela Cruz

To Paradise is not a book to read to find out what happens. If you’re looking for a narrative that begins, has a middle, and ends, look elsewhere. The intention behind what you get out of this book is not necessarily to be enchanted by a fascinating story. It challenges you, constantly, to doubt and hold the narrator against your own judgement, to confront what feel like very specific emotional landscapes—but are actually universally experienced and extremely human—and, to work out what happened, based on the rules and the structure that Yanagihara establishes and the non-linear way that information is revealed to you. The first book sets up each of the roles that each character will play for the rest of the narrative. The excitement of the story keeps you engaged, the emotions are so palpable that it’ll make your heart race. It invites you to form your own opinions about each person’s motives, and then the second book snatches them away from you. It’s a shame to see that the second book drags on for many, but I almost envy the people who felt that way. To those with a disabled family member—particularly a disabled parent—it’s a love letter we’d never thought we’d get to read. Book two evolves into a tool for introspection, through the eyes of the two main characters, and deals with heavy concepts like death, loneliness, abuse, and identity. It shows us the results of everyone’s individual cocktails of those concepts, and their relationships with them in their adult lives, before we learn about the childhood that brought them to that points as adults. Many times, I felt myself gasp and reread a passage, stopping to save a paragraph of real-life wisdom hidden in the narrative. Book three takes those concepts and blows them up to a societal scale. We, as the reader, by this point, have been trained to follow Yanagihara’s clues to put the narrative together, taking what we know from the first two books and fitting each character together like pieces of a puzzle. The satisfaction of finding new information through the unconventional narrative structure kept me engaged, and it also kept me from having to dwell on the tragedy of the story. This is a book that I think you should read if you have ever grieved for someone who was still living, or sought a community that always seemed just out of reach, or had an estranged or complicated relationship with a caregiver. Themes repeat themselves, namely the enduring communities that form around queer resilience, and the way colonialism touches every corner of the book. To Paradise challenges you to imagine people different than how you’d expect, their intentions, their identity, and their moral compass. It will give you catharsis, much to look inward about, and a sense of being seen.