"You Have Your Hands Full!"

Book Description 

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.

My Review 

I have not read any of Brown’s previous books before but I was intrigued by the premise of this latest work. Jane has grown up in a state of tabula rasa; she only knows what her father has taught her, which has left her with large gaps in her education. She does not see anything particularly wrong with living in isolation, nor does she fully understand how her father is perceived by others. 

Now, being of a certain age, I can remember stories in the news involving isolated cabins in the woods and manifestos etc, so the plot hooked me from the very beginning. Jane might have been clueless about her father’s intentions, but I knew what was going to happen. However, there were other plot elements that took me by surprise; I appreciated the big reveal. 

I would absolutely recommend What Kind of Paradise. I’m approximately the same age as Jane, so it was easy to empathize with her. Knowing how her situation would unfold did not affect my interest– rather, I was more invested in the outcome because I wanted to see how Jane would handle herself. This is my first experience reading one of Brown’s books, but it certainly won’t be my last.   

I received a digital ARC of this book from Random House/NetGalley.