Paradise Lodge, by Nina Stibbe

Having recently read the first novel in this series (?), Man At The Helm, this book is more enjoyable when one has the context of that novel to work with.  Lizzie Vogel is no longer a precocious nine-year old but is now fifteen years old in the mid 1970’s and wants to earn some money so that she can buy some luxury health and beauty goods for herself given the rather impoverished state of her family.  There are, besides these material reasons, other reasons why the narrator is looking for work and not being as diligent a student as she could otherwise be, namely the fact that her best and only close friend is going through a punk phase and she feels somewhat alienated from the rest of the girls in her class, and her mother and stepfather are going through a bit of a rough time because her mom reneged on a deal not to have any more children given their troubled economic position, all of which leaves Lizzie somewhat out of sorts and looking for a way forward, even if her present behavior is jeopardizing her chance at meeting her intellectual potential, as everyone recognizes she is a smart girl.

The plot itself is episodic but highly entertaining.  Lizzie and the twin sister of her friend, both fifteen years of age, start work at the dodgy Paradise Lodge, a local nursing home organized on rather shambolic principles and going through some obvious hard times.  Lizzie keeps getting shifts that cause her to miss classes, jeopardizing her position in the academic track, and finds out that the world of Paradise Lodge is far smaller than is entirely comfortable.  The owner’s wife leaves the owner and starts a rival nursing home that allows her to be new and exciting, even as old people die and the people are full of secrets.  Lizzie has her first love, who happens to be the Anglo-Chinese boyfriend of her young coworker, and her mother and the titular man at the helm end up getting married, and Lizzie finds out the connections that exist between some of the people she helps take care of, one of which leaves her a mysterious bequest that allows her to fulfill her destiny as an intellectual in the book’s rather bittersweet ending.  A coming of age novel is combined with a humorous example of the management of business changes that are less than universally popular.

Like the previous novel, this book combines a great deal of humor that relates to people and their odd habits with a lot of poignant and bittersweet and sad moments.  One wonders why the adults who should be protecting Lizzie are once again failing so miserably at it.  Lizzie’s mother is consumed with her desire to be pregnant and her longings for love, her stepfather is busy with working and trying to keep the family financially solvent, no easy task.  Her older sister goes off to university but then has a mental breakdown of sorts and switches over to nursing as a field.  And even the head of the school, whose stepfather is an able-bodied long-term resident at the lodge, decides to pursue her own private goals rather than seeking the best interests of Lizzie, who herself clearly does not know what she is about.  All of this suggests a world that is extremely unsafe for children and which leaves them vulnerable to all kinds of unwanted pressure and attention merely because no one is really looking out for them.  And so while there are many incidents worth laughing at, this book is really a far more sad and melancholy one than many will realize.