MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksDiofebi’s storytelling is at its best in the perspectives of Ray and Tom. Diofebi spent several years as a professional poker player, and he offers an inside look into that peculiar culture. Diofebi does not hesitate to poke fun at his own kind. He introduces readers to many over-the-top personalities, all of whom are equally outraged that too many professionals are filling up poker rooms and not enough amateur players to siphon off losses from. I’m a former casino cocktail waitress, and I can attest to the verisimilitude in these scenes. Ray is the most sharply drawn figure ... The characterizations of non-gamblers, however, are a bust. Mary Ann is described primarily by her beauty, shallowness, and self-absorption ... When it comes to understanding what makes Mary Ann tick, readers don’t get much depth ... Diofebi’s prose reflects the extravagance and indulgence that most associate with Las Vegas casinos. He squeezes every last detail out of scenes that would actually benefit from restraint. We get a neon splash of every narrative trick a novel can offer: comedy and noir, cliché and originality, shallow entertainment and complex social commentary, plus a prologue, an epilogue, emails, footnotes, social media posts, and even a mid-novel screenplay. Readers may become overwhelmed just as Tom did after his first casino buffet ... To claim that Paradise, Nevada is a truth-telling novel about Las Vegas is inaccurate. It is an unruly parody of the casino industry sales pitch: that anyone can be a winner here ... Diofebi never holds his characters responsible for their serious flaws. Each gets their own paradisiacal ending, most of which are far away from Paradise ... The real Paradise south of the city limits is a diverse city of working-class people who take great pride in their work, their union, and their jobs, and have little interest in burning their places of employment to the ground.
