Olive Senior’s Paradise Once is a powerful historical novel that vividly portrays a crucial period in the lives of the Taíno people. Senior’s work weaves history and mythology, capturing the genesis and heart of Caribbean culture and showcasing her incomparable talent.
—Edwidge Danticat, author of Krik? Krak!
The Caribbean imagined in Olive Senior’s new novel, Paradise Once (Akashic, $19.65), is both magical and unsettling . . . The novel reads like fantasy, steeped in the tropes of epic quests and mythical landscapes, but it is, in fact, a historical novel—and a superb one. At its core, Paradise Once is a quest narrative, reminiscent of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy . . . Senior crafts a mythic odyssey led by a band of richly drawn characters. But no fantasy—Caribbean or otherwise—can succeed without effective world-building, and here Senior excels . . . What makes Paradise Once particularly compelling, however, is its emotional resonance. We come to care deeply for its characters . . . [Paradise Once] is, at heart, a historical novel—one that resurrects the Caribbean’s pre-colonial past with urgency, beauty, and heartbreak.
—Guyana Chronicle
In Paradise Once, Olive Senior achieves what no other Caribbean novelist has done before—capture in a poignantly detailed story the human and environmental catastrophe of the early years of the Columbian encounter. Exquisitely researched and steeped in the language and worldview of the Taíno people, this is a historical novel like no other, one grounded in Senior’s complete immersion into a world just becoming aware of its imminent disappearance, a world she fiercely and vividly brings back to life in its richness and magic.
—Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, author of Creole Religions of the Caribbean
Olive Senior gifts us an incisive view of our Taíno world at contact. I welcome this emerging literature . . . we need it.—José Barreiro (Hatuey), author of Taíno
The former poet laureate of Jamaica and Writers’ Trust of Canada Matt Cohen Award winner takes on the myth of Taíno extinction in this highspirited and riveting tale inspired by a massacre by Spanish forces in 1513 Cuba . . . Exquisitely researched and deftly written, it’s a vivid recreation of the origin of Caribbean culture through its resistance fighters known by history as Maroons.—Toronto Star
A bittersweet ode to a paradise lost and a people forced to transform to survive, Paradise Once returns the legendary Taíno people to the forefront of ‘New World’ historical fiction.
—Historical Novel Society
Senior is particularly deft at exploring social class, maternal terrain, and distance. The territory she writes about could not interest this reader more . . . Senior skillfully depicts the space between mother and children. . . What’s remarkable at times is Senior’s subtle depiction of family tension, the prodding between mother and daughter, the apprehension of what the one does or mainly does not know of the other.—Globe and Mail, on Dancing Lessons
At every level of her stories’ constructions, Senior works deftly . . . dealing with open palms in the deep wells of remembrance, ancestry, and a crosshatch of colonizing scars, this fiction looks face-upwards to the mountains of multiple Jamaicas for hope, home, and daily bread.—Trinidad Guardian, on The Pain Tree
Arrival of the Snake-Woman has consolidated [Olive Senior’s] reputation as one of the most accomplished writers of short fiction and as one of the Caribbean’s finest creative minds.
—Caribbean Week, on Arrival of the Snake-Woman
The entire future of Caribbean prose is mapped out in this collection of stories, and I don’t know a single Caribbean writer who doesn’t reread it often.—Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings, on Summer Lightning
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