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WHAT KIND OF PARADISE
Janelle Brown
Random House
June 3, 2025
368 pages
Amazon | Bookshop.org | Goodreads
Another very different book……I think I have a love/indifferent opinion of it.
The MFC is a 17-year-old girl, Jane, who lives off the grid in Montana, with her father. Very, very much off the grid. They have lived there for fourteen years, with just a few trips into civilization for supplies. Her father has told her that her mother died.
The time frame is the late 1990s. It is the dawn of the internet era, and it is good times in Silicon Valley. Computers are starting to become mainstream, and there are bigger and better things to come.
This is a coming-of-age story, for both Jane and the Internet. Jane is discovering that there is a lot of life outside of the woods that surround her. The Internet is on its way to becoming part of everyone’s life….whether it be good or bad.
The storyline is great. It keeps me turning pages. Parts of it are fast-moving, then it slows down to a crawl before it picks up again. For me, there is a bit too much philosophizing in it. The last half is quite dramatic and interesting.
This book would make for great discussion in a book club. There is the good/bad conundrum of life before and after the Internet. There is the upbringing of a child. There is truth and untruth. A lot to think about, especially twenty-five-plus years after the setting of the book.
The ending was good. For me, this is one of those books that I can appreciate a lot more after I finished reading it. At that point, I can look at it as a whole.
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