What Kind of Paradise
A Novel
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4.2 • 240 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A teenage girl breaks free from her father’s world of isolation to discover that her whole life is a lie in this “absorbing and well-crafted” (The Washington Post) novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Pretty Things and Watch Me Disappear.
“A mesmerizing blend of coming-of-age and psychological suspense, set against the birth of the internet age.”—People
The first thing you have to understand is that my father was my entire world.
Growing up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s, Jane knows only the world that she and her father live in: the woodstove that heats their home, the vegetable garden where they try to eke out a subsistence, the books of nineteenth-century philosophy that her father gives her to read in lieu of going to school. Her father is elusive about their pasts, giving Jane little beyond the facts that they once lived in the Bay Area and that her mother died in a car accident, the crash propelling him to move Jane off the grid to raise her in a Waldenesque utopia.
As Jane becomes a teenager she starts pushing against the boundaries of her restricted world. She begs to accompany her father on his occasional trips away from the cabin. But when Jane realizes that her devotion to her father has made her an accomplice to a horrific crime, she flees Montana to the only place she knows to look for answers about her mysterious past, and her mother’s death: San Francisco. It is a city in the midst of a seismic change, where her quest to understand herself will force her to reckon with both the possibilities and the perils of the fledgling internet, and where she will come to question everything she values.
In this sweeping, suspenseful novel from bestselling author Janelle Brown, we see a young woman on a quest to understand how we come to know ourselves. It is a bold and unforgettable story about parents and children; nature and technology; innocence and knowledge; the losses of our past and our dreams for the future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brown (I'll Be You) wrestles with family, morality, and technology's effects on both in this hypnotic coming-of-age story. Teenage Jane has grown up tech-free with her father in the woods of Montana. She doesn't remember much from before, when her mother was alive and the family lived together in the Bay Area, but Jane is curious about her past and the secrets her paranoid father is obviously hiding from her. When Jane's dad comes home from one of his habitual and mysterious trips, he brings with him a laptop, a modem, and a book on coding. Jane can't help but fall under the internet's spell, but after she helps her father set up a website to spread his pro-Luddite message, he revokes her access. Jane rebels by forcing her way into his latest trip, only to learn that her father has been engaged in criminal activity—and she's just become his accomplice. Panicked but armed with a handful of clues, Jane returns to California on her own to uncover the truth about her past. From the opening pages, Brown sets the suspense at a tantalizing slow boil, and Jane is a winningly well-shaded protagonist, but most of the plot's big reveals are predictable. Still, mystery readers drawn to character-driven stories will find much to like.
Customer Reviews
Theroux on Crack
Talk about the ultimate in gaslighting! I love the blend of a Walden Pond type in our somewhat modern society, espouses the evils of technological overload, combined with a father abusing his daughter by sheltering her from the potential for abuse in our world. It was a well-written and thought provoking, coming of age story. The narrator’s voice was engaging and never grating, which is pretty hard to do.
Great read
The author hooked me in from the beginning to the end. I devoured this story
Surprising and addictive
Couldn’t put the book down. Great read.