AUTHOR: Lyndsay Faye
This historical novel is also a love story and a book about finding and accepting your true, authentic self, set in 1921, with earlier flashbacks. Alice James, aka Nobody, grew up in Harlem, a half-Italian born to a now single mother turning tricks in the hotel where they live. In the book's present, Alice is on the run, nursing a festering bullet wound and carrying a suitcase full of counterfeit cash. She ends up in the Paragon Hotel, a Black-owned hotel in Portland, Oregon that caters to a strictly Black clientele. The arrival of a near-death white woman causes quite a stir. Throw in the KKK, a missing mixed-face child, Alice's attraction to the Black train porter who saved her life, and a lot of secrets, and you end up with a true page-turner as Alice forms attachments with the denizens of the Paragon Hotel and faces her own questionable past working with Italian mobsters. I fell in love with Alice and all the other characters, their warts and all.
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