Dividing paradise: Rural inequality and the diminishing American dream By JenniferSherman, Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 2021. pp. 288. 29. 95 (pbk). ISBN: 9780520305137

The story is common by now: wealthier folks move into a working-class, lower-income area, raising tensions between them, and the existing residents. The newcomers, who are well-educated professionals, build and renovate homes, open businesses like art galleries and boutiques, and start forming helpful social networks among themselves. The old-timers, folks left behind by deindustrialization, continue their struggle to find affordable, adequate housing and good jobs, go to stores with limited selections, and rely on weak social networks to make ends meet. Basic gentrification, right? Not when it's a rural setting a day's drive from the nearest major city. In her new book, Dividing Paradise: Rural Inequality and the Diminishing American Dream, Jennifer Sherman explains what happens in rural places when an economy of extraction and land-based industries gets replaced by one of services. Her case is Paradise Valley, an area on the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains in Washington State. Its timber industry, with good jobs in logging and sawmills, had disappeared by the 1980s. Local efforts then shifted the region to an amenity-based tourism economy. The natural setting became more valuable as a place for outdoor activities like hiking, skiing, and camping than as a place for wood processing. New residents, mostly retirees and second homeowners from the state's urbanized west side, started moving there in the 1990s and early 2000s, while the number of weekend visitors increased. By the 2010s, as high-speed Internet became widely available, more working-age amenity migrants from large cities began moving to Paradise Valley permanently. They have come in search of a rural idyll of nature and community, "a lost Eden, of a past perfection" (p. 2), and either telecommute, bringing their jobs with them, or find new careers. Here is where Sherman's story really unfolds. Her aim is to show the human costs of the successful commodification of a rural utopia through an analysis of the social class divides that have emerged and inequality that has increased in Paradise Valley. These divides are economic, yes, but Sherman digs deeper to reveal their noneconomic nature. Forms of symbolic capital—social, cultural, human, and moral—play integral roles in shaping the opportunities and choices for people in Paradise Valley and serve as the mechanisms for how inequality gets reproduced there. While newcomers face challenges upon moving to the area, like career sacrifices, fewer options for essential services like childcare, and new responsibilities of rural daily life, they are able to tap their economic and symbolic resources to address them and live quite comfortably and happily. Existing residents, or "old-timers," however, either lack the economic, social, cultural, human, and social capital to make a meaningful difference in their outcomes and life chances or possess versions of these resources that have no currency in the current economy and local context. Sherman introduces the concept of "class blindness," or how social class inequalities go unacknowledged by people with privilege, to explain how these in-migrants fail to recognize the struggles of old-timers as results of structural disadvantages. Instead, newcomers see them as lacking a work ethic or moral virtue and focus their energies on charity to help people in need. Old-timers react with frustration and hostility, directed at newcomers, themselves, others in their community like them, and even the government. Feeling disempowered and without agency in their own homes, the social cohesion they once had erodes even further. Dividing Paradise is a wonderful, fine-grained community study in a type of place that does not receive nearly enough scholarly attention. I'll raise two points that I hope will inspire future scholars conducting research in rural communities. First, Sherman focuses much of the analysis of Paradise Valley's old-timers on what they have lost and how they have struggled amid economic restructuring and gentrification, framed around the idea of resilience. It's rather common to examine working-class and low-income groups in these ways. We learn what they have lost and how they are surviving (that is, how they are being resilient). But resilience among the underprivileged is a foregone conclusion—when confronted with harsh structural conditions, people with few resources have to be resilient, or else. A focus on resilience could also lead to inaction from people in positions of power—if underprivileged people are resilient, then there is no need to change anything. The details are certainly important, but what other lenses could we use to make sense of the rural poor and working class? What sort of local agency in the face of change do they show, for instance, and what forms of resistance to structural forces do we see them pursue? Answering these questions would really further our understanding of how these groups experience structural conditions and changes to their communities. Second, Sherman's sample of newcomers and old-timers is almost entirely White (95% and 85%, respectively), which makes sense given the population. She centers social class in her analysis, which also makes sense for a book about gentrification and inequality, and does not explicitly examine race or racialization. The book is not weakened by these missing elements. But gentrification scholars are (finally) starting to make race more central in their studies and in ways that go beyond demographic shifts and inter- and intra-racial conflicts and tensions. If all space—urban, suburban, rural—is racialized, then what role does race play in a spatial process like gentrification? Cases of White newcomers moving to majority-White communities are not exceptions to this question. Sherman notes that an all-White environment mostly insulates her participants from having to discuss racial issues at all (p. 34), which reinforces their racially privileged structural positions. At the same time, readers can easily tease out different White identities from the data presented (such as the more progressive, cosmopolitan White newcomers and conservative, working-class old timers) and the ways different expressions of Whiteness and racial ideologies get inscribed on and shape space. Sherman mentions how "whiteness itself is not monolithic" and "the meaning of 'whiteness' changes according to social context and reference groups" (p. 10). It would be fascinating to theorize race further and learn more about how it operates in rural places undergoing economic transformations, both those that are gentrifying and those that are becoming more racially and ethnically diverse through immigration. Dividing Paradise has provided an excellent analysis about an understudied type of place, and a fine starting point for pushing scholarship on rural community change forward. The author declares no conflicts of interest.