Paradise Pawn

A dazzling debut novel about best friends, adolescent longing, and the Florida pawn shop that promises to make their dreams come true—if it doesn’t break them apart first.

Teenage best friends Jackie and Kayla can sell anything. Alongside their fathers, they work at a pawn shop in Cherry Beach, Florida, handling everything from luxury jewelry to chainsaws and more. When the girls learn that Kayla’s family can’t afford a private school opportunity that Jackie’s can, Jackie becomes distraught about losing her best friend. With their sharp minds but youthful lack of foresight, they scheme a way to embezzle money from the pawn shop. As the hot Florida summer unfolds, the girls steal thousands of dollars from the shop. But when their heist is discovered, Jackie is faced with a situation that no amount of negotiating or charisma can fix.

With incredible heart and wit, and based on Richardson’s own experience working behind the counter of a pawn shop, Paradise Pawn navigates current-day themes of trust, familial love, female friendship, and class differences, and asks us how far we would go to protect the ones we love most.“Paradise Pawn introduces us to a world that feels deeply lived in, and Meg Richardson gets every detail just right. In the pawn shop, we are privy to the pendulum of human desperation: what people need and what they're willing to sacrifice. The friendship between Jackie and Kayla perfectly captures the feeling of being caught between: between new friends and old friends that feel like family, between childhood and adulthood, between wanting to be close and wanting to be your own person. Paradise Pawn is a touching ode to the gleeful delusion and quiet heartbreak of growing up.” —Katie Yee, author of Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

“A lovely book that captures the rhythms and travails of working-class life. Meg Richardson is a rising new talent.” —Gary Shteyngart, author of Vera, or Faith

“Brilliant and bighearted, Paradise Pawn transported me back to the electrifying intensity of young friendship. It beautifully captures the feeling of slowly waking up from childhood and emerging into the adult world only to realize it's often not what we thought it would be. A total gem of a debut!” —Charlee Dyroff, author of Loneliness & Company

“You’ve never read a coming-of-age novel like this before. Meg Richardson manages to capture the exact moment when childhood tips into puberty. Funny and sweet without shying away from the darker moments of adulthood, Richardson transforms our ideas of what it means to be a girl in this laugh-out-loud novel about best friendship, growing up, and working class life.” —Molly McGhee, author of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind

“Meg Richardson’s Paradise Pawn joins the ranks of novels helmed by heartbreaking child narrators (think Kaye Gibbons’s Ellen Foster, Lisa Shea’s Hula, Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!) who are up against themselves and the world trying to figure out who they are and who they might be. In a voice filled with authority and authenticity, Jackie tries to navigate an unfair world while caring for and about her single father and her best, best friend, sometimes succeeding brilliantly and sometimes failing spectacularly. With deft compassion, Richardson paints a clear-eyed portrait of the world of pawn shops and beach towns, allows Jackie to get into all sorts of messes, and sticks with her while she figures her way out, reminding both her characters and her readers of something we all could use a reminder about: You can’t control what the world throws at you, and everyone makes mistakes, so being a grown-up might mean nothing more and nothing less than owning what is yours to take responsibility for.” —Karen Shepard, author of Kiss Me Someone

“Paradise Pawn cleverly captures the absurdity of adulthood through the eyes of a child. As an employee in a pawnshop—where love and desperation, poverty and wealth are on display just as much as the wares—our young narrator bravely clings onto how the world should be, even as she is reminded daily of how it really is. Hopeful, heartbreaking, and oftentimes hilarious, Richardson artfully paints a vibrant, colorful world with only black ink on a white page.” —Kat Tang, author of Five-Star Stranger

Meg Richardson is a writer, translator, and cartoonist. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Originally from Iowa, she currently lives in Vermont. Paradise Pawn is her first novel.