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My BOTM Pick for June: What Kind of Paradise by Janelle Brown; Retail $17.76
Back of Book Summary:
Growing up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s, Jane knows only the world that she and her father live 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 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.
My Summary
For Jane Williams, realizing her father was the one who set off a bomb inside a Microsoft building to kill his former colleague is only part of the shock. There, on the TV screen in her only friend's bungalow, is a grainy video still of teenage Jane and her dad, hurrying away from the building.
Raised off the grid in rural Montana, Jane has always thought herself to be the daughter of widower Saul Williams, a man whose wife died in a car crash when she was just 4 years old. Homeschooled by her Harvard educated father, taught to hunt and fish and how to escape their booby trapped house should the feds ever come knocking on their door, Jane has always seen her father as her mentor, her protector, and her hero.
But when Saul brings a computer and dial-up modem into their rented hideaway and directs Jane to teach herself how to code so she can post his rambling anti-technology manifesto to the Internet, the teenager begins to see her father's carefully constructed a reality in the wilderness that's too good to be true. Snooping in her dad's office, Jane finds clues that her life story isn't the one her dad has always told her. Is her father the man she has always thought he was, or has she been living a lie with a monster?
The Verdict
What if Theodore "Ted" Kaczynski had a daughter? The domestic terrorist best known to the nation as the Unabomber spent years terrorizing the nation with bombs sent via the mail to university professors and airline and advertising executives, time that he's believed to have spent off the grid and alone.
Best-selling author Janelle Brown's novel — and July BOTM Club pick — What Kind of Paradise offers a look at what would have been should the Unabomber have had a child before abandoning his life as a mathematician in academia and becoming one of the nation's most infamous domestic terrorists.
Brown has said her protagonist's father is loosely based on the Unabomber, and through this lens we see the monster rendered as complicated man. It's a treatment that's not quite sympathetic but certainly more human.
Arriving on shelves at the dawn of a new era of artificial intelligence, Janelle Brown's What Kind of Paradise is a timely investigation of the moral dilemmas that entangle our technological advancements, but it's also a classic story of father and daughter, nature and nurture. Jane has to make a choice: Does she love the father who raised her or hate the monster who betrayed her?
Value — Was This Box Worth It?
Was the June 2025 BOTM Club subscription worth it? The gripping story that drew me in from the get go and kept me wrapped to the end certainly puts this one in the win column for me.
Like my May pick, the overall cost analysis comes in just a wee bit shy — the BOTM Club starts at $17.99, depending on your chosen subscription (the first month of a subscription is currently $9.99), and the hardcover of What Kind of Paradise is priced at almost exactly that on Amazon.
The Cost: $9.99 (This price is only for your first month).
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