A MAP TO PARADISE
Susan Meissner
Berkley Publishing Group
March 18, 2025
352 pages
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I have been reading Susan Meissner’s books for a long time. She focuses on a variety of themes and I have enjoyed them all. It’s been interesting to watch her writing style evolve and character development perfected. In my mind, each book is better than the last one read.
A Map to Paradise is multi-layered and a little convoluted. In the beginning, as the storyline is being set up, it is a little slow. Then, it takes off. It takes place in the 1950s, one of my favourite eras.
The three main characters are women. Eva is an immigrant Displaced Person from Eastern Europe, Melanie is a budding actress with a successful movie under her belt and June is the sister-in-law of a successful screenwriter. As different as they seem at the outset, they become bonded friends as they help each other.
There are many interesting components to the plot. There is McCarthyism and the black listing of many top Hollywood names, agoraphobia, family strife, SECRETS (always necessary, in my mind), wildfires of Malibu, dead bodies and much more. It seems like a lot but evolves naturally.
The story has a Hollywood ending, as is befitting the storyline. There were a few happy surprises for this reader.
I appreciated the Author’s Notes at the end. Kudos to Ms Meissner for the research she did to make the historical aspects of the story genuine. And, I love her description of the different but same meanings of Home to each of the characters.
Thank you to NetGalley and the Publisher for the Advance Readers Copy.
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