On July 14, at Still North Books & Bar, cartoonist and writer Meg Richardson read from her debut novel “Paradise Pawn” to a group of Upper Valley community members. Richardson said she wrote the novel eight years ago, in her early 20s. It was published in July 2026 by Tin House.
In the talk, she said the book grew out of her experience working at a pawn shop one summer as a student. In pawn shops, the brokers are supposed to appraise a personal belonging a client brings, give them a loan that equates the appraised value and keep the belonging for a determined time. If the client repays the loan and its interest on time, they receive the item back.
Richardon said that the process of determining and writing loans for customers “makes you informally interview people for stuff they are borrowing.” Employees judged how much to lend using a rough metric of categories like need, emotional attachment and payment history. Out of those exchanges with different people, Richardson learned something unexpected. She found that children “are more open to talk about money and class” than adults are. That openness, she said, makes it easier to think through the wrongs of a system.
Therefore, childhood candor sits at the center of “Paradise Pawn,” in which adolescents serve as the main characters of an otherwise adult novel that explores the issues of social and economic class differences. Jackie, 14, narrates the book.
Jackie has known her close friend Kayla since infancy, and the two work in a pawn shop in Cherry Beach, Florida alongside their fathers. The girls are inseparable until Kayla’s father cannot pay the tuition for private school, leading into the girls’ primary struggle as they try to embezzle money from the shop to find a solution to Kayla’s financial crisis.
In Chapter 4 — the section Richardson read at the event — Jackie reminisces about a rupture in her friendship with Kayla. She traces how they grew into different characters, from when they were 8 years old to when they wound up at different high schools. In the memory, a few days after Jackie returns from her mother’s funeral, Kayla tries to comfort her and brings her to a grocery store. The store sells live lobsters in tanks, and seeing them consistently upsets Jackie because no matter how hard they try to assert control over their lives, they wind up boiled alive for tourists. Knowing this, Kayla plans to buy a lobster and release it back into the ocean, an effort to make Jackie feel that she reclaimed some autonomy and corrected a mistake of the world.
During the talk, Richardson described Kayla’s impulse of taking Jackie to a grocery store and attempting to bring her some relief as a manifestation of the “reckless belief” that defines adolescence, which she sought to highlight. The moment is imperfect: The girls try to do good, only for Jackie to later realize that the lobster from a grocery store shelf likely won’t survive in the ocean. The conviction that one can right the wrongs of the world with a friend, though, persists.
This tension between uncalculated belief and brutal reality is central to the novel. Centering the narrative around the children’s unwavering self-belief in effecting change enables Richardson to examine the complexities of the adult world exposed to limits like class differences, and situations beyond individual control. Beyond capturing that adolescent confidence, Richardson added, using young narrators let her trace a kind of memoir of her own challenges of adolescence. By bringing her own past in light within an adult novel, she aims to create a space for girlhood in adult literature.
“Paradise Pawn” is Richardson’s only prose novel; the rest of her writing takes the form of comics. During the talk, Richardson explained that she “didn’t think of [her]self as a cartoonist” when she first wrote “Paradise Pawn” eight years ago Still, traces of her cartooning sensibility run through the book: Each chapter opens with a drawing of an object tied to that section. In fact, “the style of the prose is very visual,” said Natalie Norris, Richardson’s advisor at the Center for Cartoon Studies, where Richardson was trained in comic and graphic novels.
Richardson said the members of her community at the Center for Cartoon Studies have shaped ideas for her next book project. Norris, in particular, was a valuable source of advice not only for her cartoons, but also for improving the drawings in each chapter of “Paradise Pawn.” Richardson thought these drawings served as little gifts to the reader, a reason to look forward to the next chapter.
When asked about her writing process, Richardson said she writes on Google Docs, sitting outside Co-op Food Stores in Hanover for at least an hour each day, or until her laptop battery dies. When she tires of writing prose, she turns to cartooning, and vice versa — a kind of productive procrastination. “It’s making one dessert for the other,” she said.
At the end of the event, Still North general manager H. said that, while some regulars attend every reading, cartoonists “have their own audience.” Tuesday’s crowd was a mix of comics fans and regular attendees.
For Norris, hearing Richardson read from the novel was its own kind of introduction. “It was meeting another side of Meg,” she said, “because I know her through comics.”
