What Kind of Paradise

★★★★★★★★½☆ 8.5/10

288 pages

What’s it about?

It is the mid-1990s, and Jane is seventeen years old and living in a remote cabin in the Montana wilderness with just her father for company.  Her mother died when she was young, and she knows no other life.  But her father often disappears for days at a time, and she is starting to question their existence.  One day, he returns home with a computer and a modem, opening her mind up to the outside world.  There is no going back.

What did it make me think about?

The choices we make individually and as a community.

Should I read it?

Very rarely do I read a book that I think almost all readers will enjoy- but Janelle Brown's What Kind of Paradise is one of those books. I would say it's a beach read, a coming-of-age story, a suspense thriller, and a family drama - a little bit of everything.  It will also make a great book club book.  So many themes to talk about! I remember reading Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Rifka Brunt (another thoughtful book if you haven't read it), and that story taking me back to the mid-1980s and how fearful people were of the whole AIDS epidemic.  As we move forward, it is so easy to forget the mindset of an entire generation at a particular time in the past.  What Kind of Paradise takes us back to the beginning of the computer age and the different mindsets about what was coming.  "I flipped it open and scanned some of the writer's predictions. An economic boom due to the new technological breakthroughs will enable everyone to join the middle class, so that there are no more working poor. The proliferation of new media will allow truth to disseminate in new ways, through new voices, bringing an end to widespread ignorance.  A rise in liberalism due to a connected global citizenry will usher in the New Enlightenment and the end of fascism and authoritarianism."  It makes you wonder what we are getting wrong next. And I haven't even touched on all of her father's decisions.... It was a tad predictable, but still a really enjoyable, thought-provoking read.  Lots to talk about in this one!

A passage I marked

"Never underestimate the power of love to lead you down the path toward willful blindness.  Faith in the people you adore doesn't disappear slowly, with each tiny disappointment; instead, it collapses all at once, like the final snowfall that triggers an avalanche when the weight suddenly becomes too much to bear.  I was nearing the tipping point, but I hadn't quite arrived yet."