Author: Janelle Brown
Year published: 2025
Category: Adult fiction
Pages: 368
Rating: 4 out of 5
Location: (my 2025 Google Reading map): USA (MT, CA)
Summary: 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, 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 Waldenesque 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.
Review: I liked how this novel was told from the present, with the main character looking back and telling her story to a reporter. It gives her the ability to comment on her past actions, to think them through, and to reflect on her thought processes as she lived through her experiences.
There are definitely hints of the Unabomber in this story, and the author admits that in the Afterword. A Luddite living in the Montana woods, a manifesto, and eventually murders. But the story is much more than that. It's also a look at family, friendships, love, loyalty, and what we would do if we only have access to one view of the world and the changes happening around us.
Jane has to fight against everything she's ever told as she learns more and more (I don't want to give anything away), and that isn't easy. Whom do you trust? Family? Strangers? How do you give up everything you've known? I found this story compelling and well done.
Challenges for which this counts:
- Cover Lover--watercraft
- Mount TBR
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