Goodbye Paradise

Goodbye Paradise

Author: Sarina Bowen

Rating: B+

Vibe:  Sweet, surprisingly tender, and more emotionally honest than its premise has any right to be—an escape-the-cult romance that earns every bit of its warmth.

Josh and Caleb have spent their entire lives on a dusty Wyoming compound called Paradise, where the Divine Pastor's word is law, the only sanctioned reading material is the Bible (plus a flattering little book about the Divine Pastor himself), and a boy can be cast out for working too slow in the fields—or for the far more dangerous offense of wanting his best friend. Josh has wanted Caleb for as long as he can remember, and he's been taught, with brutal efficiency, that this makes him broken beyond saving. When an accusation he doesn't deserve threatens to end him, the two of them run out of Paradise, out of Wyoming, and into a world neither of them has ever been allowed to understand. Goodbye Paradise is the story of what happens next: two young men learning to cook, learning the rules of a society that didn't raise them, and learning, slowly and a little disbelievingly, that loving each other was never the crime they were told it was.

Here's what surprised me. I went in braced for the angst—the despair, the grimness you'd expect from a doomsday-cult setup. And it's all there, make no mistake; Bowen doesn't romanticize Paradise or soften what it does to the people inside it. But the heart of the book isn't the suffering. It's the discovery. The scenes that got me weren't the dramatic ones—they were the small fish-out-of-water moments, like Josh and Caleb spotting a gay character on television and realizing, with something close to vertigo, that there are people out there who live in the open and the sky doesn't fall. That's the unusual part, and it's the best part. The romance isn't built on grand gestures. It's built on two people figuring out, in real time, that the thing they were taught to hate about themselves might be the truest thing they have.

I really liked these two. Josh carries the book—he's sweet and naive in a way that could've curdled into a caricature in lesser hands, but Bowen keeps him specific: damaged by years of being told he's less-than, quick to assume the worst about himself, and devastatingly easy to root for. Caleb is the protector, the one with a little more standing inside Paradise and a plan to get them out, and watching that alpha-of-the-compound armor give way to the frightened kid underneath is one of the book's smarter moves. If I'm nitpicking, Caleb stays a half-step out of reach—we live so much more inside Josh's head that Caleb's interior life arrives later and lighter than I wanted. But that's a quibble about a book I closed with real fondness.

And the found family is the secret weapon. Washington, the trucker who picks them up and becomes their first real friend outside each other. Maggie and Daniel, who run the Massachusetts farm where the boys land and who know exactly what it costs to walk away from a place like Paradise. What Bowen understands—and what lands hard if you're a gay man reading this—is that the family you're born into doesn't always get to keep you, and the family you build can be the thing that finally tells you you're not broken. The cult is the obvious villain, but the real arc is quieter and more stubborn: taking everything you were told about who you're allowed to love and setting it down, piece by piece. A lot of us know that story in our bones, even if we never grew up on a ranch in Wyoming.

Is it Bowen's most polished M/M? Maybe not—and your mileage will vary depending on how much you need both leads equally fleshed out. But it's tender, hopeful, and a lot more emotionally honest than the premise lets on, and it left me wanting the rest of the story. Good news there: it's the first half of a duology, so Hello Forever is waiting. A warm, unusual little book—and I mean unusual as the compliment it is.