After a few days as a guest in The Paragon Hotel, Lyndsay Faye’s historical fiction novel, I feel as though I’ve truly been on a trip. Through Harlem when it was more Italian than African–American; through Prohibition; Portland, Oregon, in 1921; the early days of the Italian Mafia, the black middle classes; and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. Not only does Faye capture a sense of time and place, she creates vivid characters in a well-plotted story that manages to tie together these places that would seem, outwardly, to have nothing to do with one another. Alice James, the protagonist, enters the story with a bang—literally; she’s just been shot. All we know is that she’s left New York under mysterious circumstances and is headed on a train west to Portland. As she lies to the porter Max, we begin to become acquainted with her unique skill set that enables her to call herself Nobody. Alice can transform into anyone she needs to be, for her own benefit or someone else’s. Though the plotlines don’t intersect, the story of Alice’s past growing up in a whorehouse and spying for the family is necessary for the reader to believe her character would take enormous risks and be completely egalitarian in her view of race relations. What Faye may do best of all is to so thoroughly capture the vernacular of the early 20th century, that you’d swear she’d been born then Max takes Alice to the all-black Paragon Hotel to recover, where she befriends Blossom Fontaine, the local nightclub sensation, and the staff at the hotel. Alice’s “complexion is of some concern” to the hotel, which is watching the growing presence of the Ku Klux Klan in a state that still technically prohibited any “Negroes or mulattoes” from living there at all. The novel traces a twin narrative; it interweaves the story of Alice’s past on the streets of Harlem with her present, in which she poses as a suffragette journalist helping the hotel staff search for a 6-year-old boy who disappeared during an outing at an amusement park. Though the plotlines don’t intersect, the story of Alice’s past growing up in a whorehouse and spying for the family is necessary for the reader to believe her character would take enormous risks and be completely egalitarian in her view of race relations. What Faye may do best of all is to so thoroughly capture the vernacular of the early 20th century, that you’d swear she’d been born then. It’s sparkling, full of metaphor and slang, and incredibly witty. Clever, too, is the ending, where tables are turned on the shapeshifting Alice. She’s not the only one with secrets. Published in Daily Times, February 25th 2019.