This is a sardonic twist, because Los Angeles was once viewed as a paradise that ordinary Americans wanted to escape to, but in the City of the Futuristic Angels life has turned into hell.
Friends battle between clinging to Susie's memory and getting on with their lives.Surprisingly, the conceit of looking down from heaven works nicely, since Ms Sebold avoids the precious, making Susie's paradise agreeably ordinary, a place where the dead learn to let go of the living while below the living learn to let go of the dead.
For Otis and the Chandlers, Southern California was a kind of real estate paradise, where ordinary, hard-working people could own their homes, perhaps with an orange tree or a swimming pool in the backyard, and the weather was almost always perfect -- a kind of 20th-century fulfillment of the American Dream, the nation's just reward for manifest destiny.
Paradise lost, paradise regained.
While the others eagerly fly off to find kindred souls in Beirut, Rita decides to stay in East Germany under a false identity -- the "legend" of the title -- living as an ordinary worker in the workers' paradise.
Katowice is no paradise in the ordinary sense – it's a Polish mining city with grey skies, worn-down walls and abandoned buildings.
Katowice is no paradise in the ordinary sense unless you're a big fan of Polish mining towns with gray skies, crumbling walls, and abandoned buildings.
Truthfully, I'm sure moms have enough on their plate already without having to factor in daily meals for the entire family, but there are those rare moments when cooking can be somewhat therapeutic and trying a new recipe can transform an ordinary kitchen into a tropical paradise.
Still, it was far from paradise and, for the ordinary person, life was brutish and short.
