Paradise Overdose - Hardcover

The decadent chic of Bahamian high life collides with bittersweet romance in this poignant and powerful novel that explores the redemptive power of love. Chris Angostura, the scion of a prominent family, frolics away his days and nights drinking and clubhopping in the Bahamas, where sex and drugs are his for the taking. It is not until he meets Robin, a beautiful and exciting artist, that he begins to face his past in order to discover the true beauty behind the seductive facade of paradise.

As its title intimates, Antoni's debut novel is steeped in irony. The gorgeous but corrupted tropical paradise he so strongly evokes is the Bahamas, land of turquoise seas and heavenly beaches, capital of tourism, cocaine, sexual opportunism, quackery, and postcolonial racial inequity. Antoni's narrator is a native, but he is white, filthy rich, and utterly depressed. His best friend Shark is black, poor, and just a little fed up with Chris' angst. Both men have developed worrisome drug habits. Shark figures he's got nothing to lose; Chris feels like he's got nothing to gain, especially since his mother's death. Then they meet Robin, a beautiful American avant-garde artist seriously ill with cancer. While Chris struggles to come to terms with painful elements of his past, to kick his habit, and to love a woman he's doomed to lose, Shark manages to enrage a Colombian drug cartel, placing all three of them in grave danger. Antoni achieves the narrative equivalent of a coke frenzy in this intelligent and spicy tale of hedonism, greed, sorrow, and the stinging absurdities of life in the Caribbean. While this isn't a perfect novel--literary values are sacrificed too readily for redundant and mechanical sex scenes and Antoni's descriptive skills need some honing--it is potent, and Antoni has great potential. Donna Seaman