Paradise Misplaced
Book 1 of the Mexican Eden Trilogy
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
I knew the secret as a child before anyone else did—that God planted the Garden of Eden just seventy-five kilometers south of Mexico City, near the town of Cuernavaca. He scattered seeds so only the most colorful flowers and the best climbing trees would grow in that semitropical paradise. He filled the stables with the fastest, strongest Arabians; mother’s aviary with more birds than anywhere else in the world. Then he constructed a wall twice as tall as Father and encircled our Eden to keep it safe. We named the garden the Hacienda of San Serafin. I swore that I would spend the rest of my life there, where nothing bad ever happens . . .
Captain Benjamín Nyman Vizcarra, son of the wealthiest man in Mexico, has everything a young man could want. But in the days leading up to the Mexican Revolution of 1910, he finds himself questioning whether he can support the old regime—and more and more distracted by his brother’s bewitching fiancee, Isabel. Setting out to expose her as a gold-digger, he instead falls deeply in love, setting himself on a path that leads to war, poverty, and alienation from his family.
Accused and convicted of his father’s murder after a fateful late-night encounter, Benjamín faces his inner demons, beginning a process that Swedenborg describes as regeneration. As he plots escape with a fellow prisoner, a Tarahumara Indian known only as El Brujo, he relives his love affair and eventual marriage to Isabel. A new question begins to form: will he run, or will he stay to confront his mistakes and win back the woman he loves?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Shaw has a killer of an opener: "The plan was simple and well-intentioned. So, too, was the murder." And thereby hangs an ambitious, three-part tale, set during the Mexican revolution of 1910 and centered on the Nyman family, headed by the domineering Gen. Lucio Nyman Berquist, a Swede whose marriage to the Mexican Manuela Vizcarra has produced three sons, a daughter, fabulous wealth, and strife. The narrative has two major pieces; one describes the immediate aftermath of the opening killing. The second is a flashback, a memoir penned in prison. Memoir writer Benjamin Nyman Vizcarra, one of the general's sons, describes the events that have led him to prison, including his wild love for Isabel, a woman he thinks has betrayed him. The flamboyant story is equally colored by magical realism (El Brujo, a wizard-like Tarahumara Indian character who runs unceasingly in the prison yard) and Swedenborgianism (heroine Isabel is a Swedenborgian). But the reader need not be familiar with Swedenborg to understand and delight in the narrative arc.
