Paradise
By Judith McNaught
Publisher: Pocket Books
Release Date: November 1, 2016
(Originally released July 1991)
Reviewed by Janga
Reviewed by Janga
When the book opens, Meredith Bancroft, the only daughter of
Philip Bancroft, an immensely wealthy man whose family owns an upscale Chicago
department store, is young, not yet fourteen. Awkward physically and socially,
she is a misfit among her peers and among her working-class classmates at the
Catholic school her father chooses for her. She has one friend in each group:
Parker Reynolds III, an eighteen-year-old golden boy with a kind heart, whose
father is the Bancroft banker; and Lisa Pontini, the bright, assertive daughter
of a pipe-fitter, whose large, lively Italian family Meredith envies.
These friendships thrive, but by the time she graduates from
high school, the ugly duckling has become a swan who is less of an outsider.
Meredith loves her controlling, emotionally distant father, and she tries to
please him. But it becomes clear that far from allowing her to choose the
college she wants to attend or allowing her to prepare to become the next
generation to head Bancroft’s, her father’s plans are for her to be “finished”
at an institution that will ensure she has the social skills to lead the kind
of life his very proper mother and grandmother led. Meredith finally stands up
to him. The resulting argument explodes, and her father attacks her with ugly
accusations and name calling. That night
she meets Matt Farrell.
Matt has big dreams too, but his upbringing has been worlds
removed from Meredith’s. He grew up in a working-class family, working in a
steel mill to support his family after his mother’s death and to pay off her
medical bills while his father found solace for his grief in a bottle. He also
worked his way through college. With an MBA in hand, he plans to work on an oil
rig in Venezuela for two years. The bonus money will fund his plan for achieving
his dream of wealth and power. Meeting Meredith Bancroft is not part of his plan.
Neither is marrying an eighteen-year-old who is pregnant with his child, but he
likes Meredith, and, despite their differences, he believes they can make their
marriage work. But Meredith’s father, furious about her marriage to a nobody,
takes interference to the level of fine art, masterminding a misunderstanding
that leaves Meredith and Matt estranged. Each holds the other responsible for a
failure that actually rests on Philip Bancroft. They divorce, and they both go
on with their lives as if their brief marriage had never taken place.
After more than a decade, they meet again. Matt is CEO of
Intercorp, an LA-based conglomerate that is buying a multi-billion-dollar
electronics company in Chicago. Meredith has become a vice-president at
Bancroft’s where she is battling the board about her plans to expand the store
to other states. Both are involved with new people, and the wounds they
inflicted on each other have not fully healed. Emotionally and—to their great surprise--legally,
the bond that connects them is not severed. But the obstacles that separated
them when they were younger have not disappeared. Indeed, they are more
complicated than they were eleven years earlier.
This is a big book, literally and metaphorically. McNaught
takes seven hundred and twenty pages to tell Meredith and Matt’s story. She has
the space to show them as young people caught up in their own struggles before
they meet. The reader is invested in the characters before the Big Misunderstanding
occurs. Caring about the characters and believing in their inexperience and
vulnerability makes accepting the misunderstanding easier. Their wealth and good
looks could make them little more that pretty images who “glitter when they
walk,” but McNaught makes Meredith and Matt likable, sympathetic, genuine human
beings. The secondary characters add to the novel’s appeal. I especially enjoy
Meredith and Lisa’s friendship. Their personalities balance each other, and
their loyalty to each other runs deeper than any bumps in the friendship.
Another benefit of the book’s length is an ending that ties up every loose end
in a blissful HEA gift to the reader.
The first time I read this book in the closing decade of the
twentieth century, I cried, I laughed, I sighed, and I said to myself, “Oh, I
want to read this one again.” Rereading it in the second decade of the
twenty-first century, my reaction is unchanged. I highly recommend this golden
oldie as a first read—or as a reread.
