Item: What Kind of Paradise
Rating: 5
Author: Catherine

What Kind of Paradise by Janelle Brown
Published by Random House
Publication date: June 3, 2025
Genres: Book Clubs, Fiction, Coming-of-age, Historical, Vacation Reading

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Jane has lived her entire life in a 700 square foot cabin near Bozeman, Montana; her contact with the modern world significantly limited. Her father is stern, but loving, a Luddite zealot who raves against technology in any form and writes copious screeds that no one reads, except Jane. Until he realizes that, with her help, the new expanse of the internet is the perfect place to get his beliefs out into the world. When his words become actions, she is forced out of the only home remembers into the wilds of 1990s San Francisco and the dot.com boom. New to much of the modern world Jane is forced to quickly adapt in Janelle Brown’s new novel, What Kind of Paradise.

Jane’s childhood is one of nature, reading, and learned self-sufficiency. She helps her father in their garden and, as she gets older, by hunting with him. He homeschools her and she becomes knowledgeable in the works of the great philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, and economists. When What Kind of Paradise opens, she is 17 and has more exposure to the world. They have a phone line, she has a friend at the local thrift store, and she’s beginning to see that the utopian world her father preaches may not exist beyond his mind. She knows he keeps secrets from her in the only locked room in the cabin, namely anything to do with her mother or their past life. It isn’t until his plans come to fruition that she’s forced to grip the slender thread she has with the outside world and run away.

For every day that Jane learns to navigate in an unfamiliar world she’s also unlocking clues to finding the family she never knew and avoiding capture by either the government or possibly, her father. Brown is adroit in playing off all the things Jane doesn’t know alongside the fully loaded vault of her brain, trained by philosophers and economists long gone. So, while she’s never seen indoor plumbing or an ATM she can quote Nietzsche. She learns how to code quickly for her new job, but has no socialization skills at all.

This combination of Jane’s awkwardness occurring alongside her real fears for her safety makes the pages fly by. She is a complicated protagonist pulling the reader between sympathy and frustration. Brown could let the novel resolve itself neatly, but instead opts to let the stories within unfold more realistically. What Kind of Paradise is a coming-of-age novel, not just for one young woman, but for the world as the dot.com boom changed the playing field forever.

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