S. F. Prescott

Filled with tension!

Janelle Brown is the New York Times bestselling author of PRETTY THINGS, WATCH ME DISAPPEAR, ALL WE EVER WANTED WAS EVERYTHING and THIS IS WHERE WE LIVE. Her work has been translated into nineteen languages, and her journalism has appeared in publications such as Vogue, The New York Times, Elle, Self and The Los Angeles Times. She spent seven years as a staff writer at Salon and Wired during the first dot-com boom in San Francisco; and launched one of the very first Web zines for women, Maxi. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children.

A young woman is raised in an isolated cabin in the woods by her father who suffers from paranoia and delusions.

I really enjoyed this story! I can’t believe it took me so long to pick up one of Janelle Brown’s books, but I’m excited to explore her other titles now. The complexities of Jane/Esme’s parents surprised and swayed my opinion from beginning to end, and that’s something I always enjoy. At first, detesting her dad and then feeling sorry for him, while having the opposite reaction to her mother. I found the corporate tech angle of her parents’ backgrounds intriguing, especially her father’s spiral into paranoid delusions based on the future of the internet. Jane/Esme had an unfortunate life which she was able to break free from, making her instantly likable. The book definitely gripped me from the start, the pace was fast, and the story held my interest. I loved the 90s timeframe and San Fran setting after Jane/Esme and her father became separated and she finally meets her mother. The shocking scene with the security guard getting shot still sticks in my mind. I found the end satisfying after she finally gained independence, but also sad considering what happened to her relationships with her parents.

For readers who enjoy stories layered with suspense, about dysfunctional families, set in the 90s.

Synopsis:

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.