Latest Release
31 Paradiso
The love of Francine’s life has died, and in hopes of starting over, she leaves proper Orange County and moves to 1990’s Venice Beach where she manages four rowdy apartments and massages new clients. She has abandoned her passion for tap dance, because stage fright makes her feet freeze. A lost soul, she tries to rejoin her estranged family of origin but instead finds herself driven to confront them about buried family secrets. The family is powerful, but the citizens of Venice Beach have magic, and despite her trouble Francine puts on her tap shoes and steps out in public.
Huffey’s third person is pure and flexible in a way that gives us access to Francine with vivid, large directness, but also to the animals and people around her. Everyone, and even objects have their own soul and subjectivity. Every single one of Huffey’s characters is terrific. The family dinners are as fun and they are treacherous. There is something very “now” about this novel, despite it being set in the early ‘90s. Maybe the world is finally ready for this book.
- Varley O'Connor, author of The Welsh Fasting Girl
You will be puzzled. You will say Huh? You will giggle. You will crack up. You will start to know who Francine Didwell is. You will hold her in your hands till the end. You will know the very original company you have kept in reading 31 Paradiso.
- Michelle Latiolais, author of Widow, She
31 Paradiso is so filled with energy, the pages fairly crackle. A story of revelations, told with enormous vim and vigor, pain and wisdom, wit and wildness, (and also, shuffles and heel rolls.) The first great American tap-dancing novel!
- Karen Joy Fowler
Rhoda Huffey writes like an angel who saw what happened in the garden and still remained an optimist. On each page of Francine Didwell’s story there is an original joy, many times rescued from the powers of her religious family and many from Francine’s amazed view of the world. At times her empathy feels like X-ray glasses and all the ordinary things in her teeming cosmos of Venice Beach, glow. She can hear her dog’s thoughts and her cat is her AA sponsor. The neighborhood becomes a heady conversation so dire and so funny we cannot look away. I couldn’t. This is a special book. With all its signs and wonders, there is tap dancing too.
- Ron Carlson, author of Five Skies
