Paradiseland

A Novel

The mysterious death of a young transgender boy

No witnesses,

    No questions,

          No answers,

               . . . . till now

When a transgender boy mysteriously dies in a small Central California town, authorities gloss over the death as just another teen suicide. Until a young African-American high school teacher from Brooklyn, New York, goes on a quest to her hometown to unearth the mystery behind the incident and the person responsible for it.

The clues to the boy’s death are found in a trove of books, which suddenly appears at the young teacher’s door one day. A letter that arrived earlier described the books as an “inheritance” from someone in her past. The person who left her the curious legacy was an educator who had once taken a passing interest in her when she was a talented but independent-minded thinker in his high school English class.

Intrigued, the young teacher, Anne Marie Moore, travels to the small Central California town where she grew up and follows the clues found in her book. Making matters difficult is the fact that Moore is a paraplegic left wheelchair bound after a car accident.

Along the way, she rediscovers certain forgotten truths about herself buried in the past as the lone black child in a school surrounded by whites and a life spent as the daughter of a crude, uneducated single mother and housemaid.

Toward the end of her stay, Moore unearths the mystery behind the boy’s unexplained death, the person behind it, and the secret that lay buried for so long in her small town’s past.