What Kind of Paradise

I am classifying this as a thriller, but that feels a bit reductive: the writing is gorgeous, and it could just as easily be classified as literary fiction. Jane grew up in the woods of Montana. Her father is her entire world. They live in a tiny cabin filled with books and an old stove. They grow their vegetables in a garden and kill their own chickens. They are as self-sufficient and off the grid as anyone can be in the 1990s. She studies nineteenth-century philosophy and eventually learns HTML to help her father publish his manifesto online. Her father is her whole world. But as Jane enters her teenage years, she is bored, and begins to realize that her father may be keeping terrible secrets. She longs for connection (and answers!), begging her father to join him on his trips outside of the cabin. But when she realizes that her love for her father has caused her to become an accomplice in a horrible crime, her world is shattered. She flees Montana for the one place where she believes she can get some answers: San Francisco–the place that her mother died, the place her father lived and worked in before Montana. Can she get answers to her questions? Can she ever forgive herself for what she allowed her father to do? I will say no more as it really is best to read this knowing as little as possible! I really loved this one.