62 pages 2 hours read

What Kind of Paradise

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2025

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Summary and Study Guide

Overview

What Kind of Paradise (2025) is a novel by Janelle Brown. It follows teenage protagonist Jane/Esme, who lives in a small, off-the-grid cabin with her widowed, isolationist father. Jane/Esme has a deep bond with her father, but their relationship begins to fracture after he pens an anti-society, anti-technology manifesto and makes her an unwitting accomplice to murder and domestic terrorism. With only the help of a friend she meets in one of the internet’s first chat rooms, she strikes out on her own, hoping to find answers about her parents’ murky past. Set against the backdrop of the internet’s rise to prominence and the first tech boom, What Kind of Paradise examines The Pressures of Familial Relationships, The Potential Benefits and Harms of Technology, and The Search for Identity and Autonomy.


Several of Brown’s previous novels, including Watch Me Disappear (2017) and Pretty Things (2020) have been New York Times bestsellers. An early contributor to Wired, Brown has longstanding ties to the world of tech, which the subject matter of What Kind of Paradise reflects.


This guide refers to the 2025 Random House hardcover edition.


Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of death, graphic violence, animal death, sexual violence and harassment, mental illness, emotional abuse, and substance use.


Plot Summary


A reporter knocks on the narrator’s door, asking if she is finally ready to tell her side of the story. She takes a deep breath, and a flood of memories washes over her.


Jane Williams spent her youth in a small, remote cabin in Montana with her father, Saul Williams. A survivalist who chose to leave society, Saul homeschools Jane and teaches her to hunt and fend for herself in the woods. His lessons include high school subjects like math and science but also university-level inquiries into analytic and continental philosophy. Jane is an intelligent, hardworking student, but she does suffer from a lack of friends and community. Her only real contacts are the local bookstore owner, Lina, and Lina’s teenaged daughter, Heidi, although Jane is not able to spend as much time with Heidi as she would like to. Saul is sometimes willing to drive them into Bozeman, where Lina’s bookstore is located, but the trips are rare. Saul writes an anti-establishment zine called Libertaire that Lina distributes and buys philosophy books from Lina for Jane’s homeschooling.


Saul is cagey about his past when Jane asks him about his life before they moved to the Montana backcountry. She knows that he has several degrees from Harvard and worked with some of the first computers before giving up his career. He’s explained that her mother, Jennifer, was a kindergarten teacher who loved Jane very much but died in a tragic car accident when she was four.


When Lina plans to stop selling zines, Saul purchases a new computer to put his ideas “online.” The internet is in its infancy, and although Saul is staunchly anti-technology, he wants to disseminate his philosophical writing somehow. He shows Jane how to use the computer, and her horizon expands exponentially. She quickly teaches herself basic coding and is astounded at the wealth of information she finds: Reading The New York Times every day feels like her first real window into the world. She enters a chat room for the first time and messages back and forth with Lionel, a young tech worker in San Francisco, California. It feels like her world is finally beginning to open up.


The idyll is short-lived. Saul pens what he titles the “Luddite Manifesto,” named for an anti-technology uprising in 19th-century England. He asks Jane to create a website for it but is disappointed by how few views it gets. Saul is increasingly distracted by his fears that technology’s rise will have dire consequences for society, and Jane begins to worry about his mental state. He is sure that the “feds” (government authorities) are on their tail and forces Jane to complete evacuation drills in the tunnel he built below their cabin. Her worst fears are confirmed when he involves Jane in an act of domestic terrorism, a bombing that kills a prominent Microsoft executive.


After the bombing, Jane and Saul split up. Jane realizes that she is at a crossroads. She can either meet up with her father, as planned, or strike off on her own. As she wavers, she finds a trove of old papers, documents, and photographs in her father’s desk. She finds a birth certificate with the name Esme Nowak; Esme’s parents are Adam and Theresa Nowak. After researching online, she also finds out that the car “accident” that her father described to her was actually one in which he faked both his and Esme’s deaths. Jane, or Esme, now resolves to find her mother. After setting the cabin on fire as Saul, or Adam, instructed, she heads to San Francisco carrying a hard drive that her father stole during the bombing, everything she found in his desk, and a large stash of cash that he had also been hiding.


After a difficult bus trip during which her bag is stolen, Esme arrives at Signal, the workplace of her chat-room friend Lionel. Although he told her that she could reach out if she ever needed help, he is stunned to see her in person. She explains the mystery of her family, leaving out her father’s manifesto and the bombing, and he tells her that he will help her try to find her mother. Esme also gets a job at the tech company where Lionel works: The industry is booming, and anyone who knows HTML can usually find work. With her basic computer skills, Esme is in luck.


Esme’s first stop is the address listed as her mother’s in her father’s old documentation, but the house is an empty lot owned, according to a neighbor, by a family named Trevante. Dispirited, she and Lionel head back to San Francisco. By this time, the police have identified her father, and both his and Esme’s faces are all over the news. However, they have only grainy security footage and badly drawn police sketches, and Esme has had the foresight to cut and color her hair. She is still worried but feels relatively safe. There is a filmmaker doing a docuseries on Signal, but she does her best to avoid the cameras.


Esme recovers her stolen bag and, using the photographs that she took from her father’s desk, begins to identify the major players in his early professional life. It appears that he is targeting his former coworkers. After confronting a man named Nicholas Redkin, who appears in one of the photographs, she learns the identity of her mother, who was the one who took the photo. She was not, as her father told her, a kindergarten teacher; she is a brilliant computer scientist who is very much alive. She now uses the nickname “Tess” and her new husband’s last name, Trevante. She lives in San Francisco, where she has enjoyed a long career in the very field that her father has rejected.


Esme and Lionel grow closer, but Lionel is starting to have more questions about her past. When she does not express disdain for the “Bombaster,” as her father is called in the media, it is clear that he suspects her of something. Since the “Luddite Manifesto” is markedly anti-technology, the Bombaster is especially reviled by those who work in tech. Lionel asks Esme if she is the bomber’s daughter, and she admits everything. While Lionel is upset that Esme didn’t tell him, he says that they need to work together to warn the rest of her father’s targets. There have been several more bombings, and her father is now wanted for additional murders. When he strikes again and Esme and Lionel realize that they haven’t figured out the bomber’s plan, Lionel says that he can’t help her anymore. Esme, feeling like everything is out of control, deletes the “Luddite Manifesto” from the internet.


Esme locates her mother and confronts her, but Tess is cold and analytical and does not seem to know what to do with her daughter. She tells Esme that they should meet in a few days’ time when she has had a chance to process her complex emotions. The next day, Esme’s father shows up and confronts her, leaving her conflicted. Later, the authorities show up at Signal’s office: The “Luddite Manifesto” was easily linked to Saul/Adam, and the government tracked its removal to the Signal office. Lionel falsely confesses to removing the manifesto to save Esme.


Esme meets with Tess, who says that she will hire a lawyer for Esme so that she can go to the police and turn Adam in. When Esme asks her if she will give her own statement, Tess declines, wanting to wait and see if Esme will be prosecuted along with Adam. The next day, Esme meets her father in a Starbucks. The authorities show up and arrest him, having been turned in by Esme.


Feeling betrayed by both her parents, Esme realizes that she will have to make her own choices and not rely on either of them. She attends art school, becomes a graphic designer, has a child, and moves to a cabin in Marin County. She and Lionel stay friends throughout her adult life. She never again has contact with either parent. She does not reach out to her mother, and her father is sentenced to life in prison. He writes to her initially, but she refuses to read his letters. Eventually, he stops writing, and she feels free.

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