What Kind of Paradise

A Novel

By: Janelle Brown

A teenage girl breaks free from her father's world of isolation in this exhilarating novel of family, identity, and the power we have to shape our own destinies—from the New York Times bestselling author of Pretty Things and Watch Me Disappear

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 Thoreau-like 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.

©2025 Janelle Brown (P)2025 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“What Kind of Paradise is a swiftly moving, gorgeously told story that wrestles with the repercussions of progress, technology, capitalism, and power. But at its heart, it’s the story of a father and a daughter fighting to understand where they belong in a world on the brink of revolutionary change. Longtime fans of Janelle Brown will be thrilled to find her blazing on all cylinders here and newcomers are in for an addictive treat. I couldn’t put it down!”—Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, New York Times bestselling author of Good Company and The Nest