Terrestrial Paradise (Paperback)

Lucinda West is released from Juvenile Detention on the eve of her eighteenth birthday. The focus of a national obsession only two years earlier, she walks out into the rain to discover that she has been forgotten. She's cold and hungry and has spends her only money at a pawn shop buying a used laptop computer. Then she sees a sputtering neon sign: Gentleman Jim's Gentleman's Club (Dancers Needed). She dyes her hair, piles on the make-up, changes her name and she feels totally hidden on stage, even as she dances naked before a crowd. Besides, she has expensive unfinished business to settle and the money at Gentleman Jim's is good. But the problem is, no one has really forgotten Lucinda. Not the unstable black lesbian stripper who takes her in that first night, nor Drake Taylor, the publisher who hunts her down and wants her to write about those infamous events that occurred the spring she turned sixteen. Of special interest to Drake, are the dark specifics of the relationship she shared with Jack McAdams, an older man with whom she is still obsessed. Lucinda agrees to write her story, and finds that her attempt to articulate what happened is really just an incantation that brings the past to life again.