What Kind of Paradise: A Novel
2025
Jane grows up off the grid with her father, Saul, in a small cabin in the Montana woods, homeschooled and cut off from technology, which Saul believes will enslave humanity. She knows only that her mother died in a car accident and that they once lived in San Francisco. As Jane comes of age and starts questioning her father’s version of events, she learns he’s involved in something far more dangerous than isolation. That discovery sends her to San Francisco to dig into her past, in a story loosely inspired by the Unabomber.
This was a gripping read for me. Brown’s writing pulls you in and keeps the pages turning without ever leaning on flowery prose, and the book resists easy categorization: it’s part literary mystery, part coming-of-age story, with a thread of romance woven through, all built around the question of whether the internet and technology have made our lives better or worse. The suspense builds slowly as family secrets peel away layer by layer, and at its core, it’s less a conventional thriller than a meditation on how much our parents’ choices shape us and whether we can ever really outrun them. It’s a slow burn, but a satisfying one, with a strong sense of the ’90s running through it.
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