The Paradise Problem Book Review

The way I cackled throughout most of this book! Anna Green is our heroine in this book and, oh my goodness, she is hilarious! Not only in her personality, but also in her appearance. Liam Weston, our hero, likens Anna to a muppet (lol). She has pink hair and when she’s not all dolled up, she’s either pantless or wearing Cookie Monster pajama pants. Liam, on the other hand, is refined and debonair. The Golden Boy of his family who is groomed to take the place of the head of the family even though he’s the middle son. These two could not be more opposite and it makes for a comical dynamic.

It definitely makes sense that Anna and Liam initially met and married out of circumstance. They both needed affordable housing and the only option was family housing. Once they both got what they needed, they went their separate ways until three years later when Liam needed Anna again. This time, Liam shows up at Anna’s doorstep after a particularly rough night. She greets him pantless, with one Big Bird slipper on her feet and in complete disarray (cue muppet). He, of course, looks completely put together. “A beautiful stranger” with “thick golden-brown hair and warm honey eyes lined with absurdly thick lashes” as Anna describes him. He’s a professor at Stanford, she’s a “starving artist”. The contrast between the two is so stark that they really shouldn’t make sense together.

One of the things that I really appreciated about this book was the level of character development. I felt like I got a really good sense of Anna and Liam’s backgrounds, who they presently are, and their motivations for who they want to be in the future. Anna was raised by a loving father who is a mechanic and an absent mother who chased her career instead of raising her daughter while Liam was raised by a toxic father who is the CEO of a big grocery conglomerate and a mother who adores him (maybe a little too much). Anna is an artist struggling to make ends meet while Liam is professor at Stanford and heir to the big grocery conglomerate. Anna wants to create beauty from nothing while Liam wants to erase toxicity from hostile environments. Where they share common ground is over their disgust for grotesque uses of money. This becomes a defining commonality in their relationship.

Okay, let’s talk about this relationship (without giving too much away). How these two lived together for two years and didn’t rip each other’s clothes off is a bit unbelievable because the tension between them once Anna put herself together was palpable. And when they finally gave in to their feelings for each other, it was absolutely game over. Although there were, of course, conflicts that disrupted their romance momentarily, there was no way that they weren’t going to end up back together. The intensity of their feelings for each other aren’t ones that just go away without an extremely egregious transgression. And the conflicts weren’t extremely egregious.

The conflicts are honestly what prevented this book from being five stars for me. The one conflict that particularly bothered me was Liam’s conflict with his father about becoming CEO of the family company. As I mentioned earlier, Liam wants to erase toxicity from hostile environments. This is such a big desire for him that he earned a PhD researching and defending whether it’s possible to change corporate cultures. His own father’s leadership of the company is what inspired this decision. So what I don’t understand, and what I think could have been done differently, is why Liam fights his father tooth and nail to take over the family business as CEO when doing so would put him in the exact position to effect change in the company’s culture (the very thing that presumably inspired his dissertation). This is minor in the grand scheme of the book, but it’s something that stood out to me. In the end, Liam states that he’s not ready to be the CEO of the company.

Speaking of endings, the ending of this book has to be one of my favorites in terms of the way it was written. Usually, authors rush into the “happily ever after”. This author* took their time with the “happily ever after”. The most beautiful part of this ending is that it didn’t have just one “happily ever after”. Anna’s father receives a “happily ever after”, Liam’s family receive a “happily ever after” (or at least a resolution to all the conflict they endured over the years), and the lovers receive a “happily ever after”, of course. It wasn’t perfectly tied up in a neat little bow, but the ending was perfect for them.

Overall, this book was hilarious, spicy, and yet hit some really deep themes of family dynamics and the disparity between the upper and middle classes. It was thoroughly entertaining while having a surprising amount of depth. I appreciated how much detail and effort went into shaping the characters as I feel like it made me more invested in their stories. If it wasn’t for the small detail about Liam’s conflict with his father, this would honestly be a five star book in my opinion.

I want to take a moment to acknowledge the uniqueness behind the author. For those who haven’t read a Christina Lauren book – like me until now – you may not know that Christina Lauren is the pen name of two writers combined into one: Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings. I found this to be impressive enough to call out because there were moments throughout the book where I got the sense that I was reading two distinct voices (and this was before I checked the author’s bio).