What if the Unibomber had a teenaged daughter by his side...

Have you heard of this one? GREAT summer read...

The book: What Kind of Paradise, by Janelle Brown.

I’ve loved Brown’s work, but this feels like her best book yet—it brings together everything she’s good at. Families with secrets, big ones, with big feelings, the way we can never understand our own pasts, the things that have to stay unresolved—and then the world side, the outer side, the way the time we’re born into makes us who we are. Add in the nascent tech industry (because this one is set in the 1990’s), where Brown has roots, and the fact that we can all look back on it now and know where it went but we are still in the midst of figuring out where it’s going, and you have a really deep, powerful, page turner of a book. It’s long and it’s worth it.

Sometimes I can do no better than give you the flap copy:

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 existence, 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.

If you’ve read this, let’s discuss, and if not—this one’s for you if The God of the Woods was your book last year, if you like that edge of literary but want and need the kind of plotting and writing that pulls you in (it’s much faster than The God of the Woods, if that matters to you). It’s also got Malibu Rising vibes.

I’m doing a week-long French intensive** at our local university this week, because I’m a language nerd and have weird hobbies, so I’m detaching at night with some Richard Osman, mostly. What’s everybody else reading this week?

** 8 hours a day for a solid week. The background—I love learning languages, it’s my weird little hobby and because I usually do it with instructors online in Fluenz, Italki or Verbling, it’s also a big part of my online social life—I spend a LOT of time talking about cultural differences and I really enjoy it. I studied French in school, but have forgotten a lot of it as I worked my Spanish up (I’m about C-1, iykyk)—but it’s still IN THERE, and I hope to get it back.