Review of What Kind of Paradise by Janelle Brown

I was intrigued by the novel's premise, in which a father weaves elaborate lies to raise his daughter in a remote wilderness, away from technology. When the story moved out of the woods, it felt more fractured to me and didn't hold together as well.

The first thing you have to understand is that my father was my entire world.

Jane doesn't remember living in the Bay area, where her mother died. She doesn't remember life with electricity, or neighbors, or technology. In mid-1990s rural Montana, Jane only knows the books her father gives her instead of sending her to school, the woodstove that provides lifesaving heat, and the peacefulness of the familiar woods.

But when Jane becomes a teenager and starts to push her father for freedom--and for answers--she begins to suspect that their life has been built on tragedy--and lies.

I was captivated by the first part of the book, in which Jane and her father are entrenched in their own world, driven by her father's mysterious, paranoid thinking and his development of his anti-technology Luddite Manifesto, as Jane begins to cobble together pieces of her past and suspicions about her true identity.

When the story moved away from the wilderness, the story felt increasingly fractured to me. Jane's sheltered background--and her doubts about what is true about the world and what was made up or exaggerated by her father, the only influence in her life to this point--means that when she leaves the woods, she is naïve and reliant on others for almost everything. This makes sense, but doesn't make her a particularly sympathetic or dynamic character. Jane is also buoyed by magical thinking, often expending emotional energy (and spending plenty of page time) wishing the past were not what it was, feeling sorry for herself, and hoping she emerges unscathed from an enormous mess. I also didn't completely buy into the depth of her new key connection to a romantic friendship--nor the lengths the other partner was willing to go to in order to protect her after a short period.

The figure of Jane's mother is easy to dislike; she reads as almost a caricature of an emotionally distant person. Jane's belief that her mother, to date a stranger, would magically resolve her many urgent challenges and problems, is part of Jane's naïvité, but it still feels far-fetched. When she disappoints Jane by failing to swoop in and save her, it doesn't feel surprising to anyone but Jane.

I appreciated the complicated feelings Jane felt around holding her father accountable, as he plausibly went to such extremes to save her from the perceived dangers of society, but the resolution to the story and Jane's unscathed state felt a little bit too easy.

The premise of the story was fascinating, and I felt drawn into the part of the novel set in the woods with a father, a daughter, and the world outside of society that they managed to create and cultivate, however misguided the reasoning for doing so may have been.

I received a prepublication version of this title courtesy of NetGalley and Random House.

More about the Author

Janelle Brown is also the author of Pretty Things and other novels.

You may also like these other Bossy reviews of novels about the woods and wilderness.