Paradise Pawn
A Novel
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A dazzling debut novel about best friends, adolescent longing, and the Florida pawn shop that promises to make their dreams come true—if it doesn’t break them apart first.
Teenage best friends Jackie and Kayla can sell anything. Alongside their fathers, they work at a pawn shop in Cherry Beach, Florida, handling everything from luxury jewelry to chainsaws and more. When the girls learn that Kayla’s family can’t afford a private school opportunity that Jackie’s can, Jackie becomes distraught about losing her best friend. With their sharp minds but youthful lack of foresight, they scheme a way to embezzle money from the pawn shop. As the hot Florida summer unfolds, the girls steal thousands of dollars from the shop. But when their heist is discovered, Jackie is faced with a situation that no amount of negotiating or charisma can fix.
With incredible heart and wit, and based on Richardson’s own experience working behind the counter of a pawn shop, Paradise Pawn navigates current-day themes of trust, familial love, female friendship, and class differences, and asks us how far we would go to protect the ones we love most.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The antics of two clever 14-year-old friends drive this diverting debut from Richardson. Kayla and Jackie work with their dads at Paradise Pawn in Cherry Beach, Fla. Jackie, the narrator, views their layaway clients with world-weary sympathy ("They are paying for a funny kind of hope that in thirty days, when their next payment is due, they will be rich"). The girls are inseparable, but when Kayla's dad can't pay the tuition at the private school they dreamed of attending together, they plan to come up with the money by cooking the books. The shop's owner is a selfish and greedy drunk who terrorizes his employees, making it that much easier to justify cheating him out of cash. The money accumulates, but the friendship grows complicated, especially after they begin the school year at separate schools, where Kayla wins a student council election and Jackie makes a new friend. Richardson devotes the story to the perils of teen life, which can feel limiting, but her portrait of the girls' hopes and dreams rings true ("I also don't feel like I can ask God for little things like making a pimple dry up, because then he'll think I'm spoiled," Jackie narrates). Readers will find plenty to admire.
