Margins
What Kind of Paradise book cover
What Kind of Paradise
A Novel
2025
First Published
4.15
Average Rating
456
Number of Pages

A teenage girl breaks free from her father’s world of isolation to discover that her whole life is a lie in this propulsive new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Pretty Things and Watch Me Disappear. “A twisty, sharp coming-of-age story for our strange techno-utopian times.”—Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans 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 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 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.

Avg Rating
4.15
Number of Ratings
28,128
5 STARS
34%
4 STARS
50%
3 STARS
15%
2 STARS
2%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads

Author

Janelle Brown
Janelle Brown
Author · 7 books

Welcome to my home on Goodreads. A little about me: I'm the New York Times bestselling author of the novels PRETTY THINGS, WATCH ME DISAPPEAR, ALL WE EVER WANTED WAS EVERYTHING, THIS IS WHERE WE LIVE and the upcoming I'LL BE YOU. My books have been New York Times bestsellers and published in a dozen countries around the world. My books tend to be page-turners with dysfunctional family relationships at their hearts; while my first two books were more satirical domestic dramas, my latest three are literary suspense. I'm also very much a California writer, and my books are set across the state. I'm always happy to answer questions here, but you can also find me on Instagram and Twitter—and if you visit http://www.janellebrown.com you can also sign up for my newsletter. I've known I wanted to be a novelist ever since I was in first grade, when my teacher looked at the whimsical little books I liked to make (and the pile of books I checked out of the school library every week) and said that I could be an author when I grew up. I took her suggestion to heart. It took me several decades to get to novel-writing, though. I first started off as an essayist and journalist, writing for Wired and Salon in San Francisco, during the dotcom boom years. In the 1990’s, I was also the editor and co-founder of Maxi, an irreverent (and now, long-gone) women's pop culture magazine. My writing has also appeared in Vogue, The New York Times, Elle, Wired, Self, The Los Angeles Times, and numerous other publications. I've spent the fifteen years working on my novels, writing the occasional essay, and living in Los Angeles with my husband and two children.

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