39. What Kind of Paradise by Janelle Brown

listened on Libby

368 pgs.

2025
Adult CRF
Finished 8/19/25
Goodreads rating: 4.14
My rating: 4
Setting: late 1990s Montana

My comments: Jane/Esme, raised by her dad in the middle of the Montana woods, gives us her life story from her point of view, telling how she lived and grew up with her dad until she discovered what was really going on.  Is technology going to "get us" in the end?

Goodreads synopsis: 

A teenage girl breaks free from her father's world of isolation in this exhilarating novel of family, identity, and the power we have to shape our own destinies—from the New York Times bestselling author of Pretty Things and Watch Me Disappear

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 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.

38. Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

listened on Libby

298 pgs.

2025
Genre/Level
Finished 8/3/2025
Goodreads rating: 4.12
My rating: 4.25
Setting: contemporary tiny island off the cost of Antarctica, home of the world's seed bank.

My comments: At the moment, not really sure how I feel about this story.  It was tragic from beginning to end.  It was beautifully written, a tangle of facts that were given to the reader in a wonderful way.  It was slowly paced, though a little to slow in places.  But the pictures it drew in my mind!   Quite something.  And how do you frate a story that pisses you off and entertains you at the same time?  Very difficult.

Goodreads synopsis:  A family on a remote island. A mysterious woman washed ashore. A rising storm on the horizon.

Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers, but with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants. Until, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman mysteriously washes ashore.

Isolation has taken its toll on the Salts, but as they nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, it begins to feel like she might just be what they need. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting herself, starts imagining a future where she could belong to someone again.

But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, they all must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late―and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.

A novel of breathtaking twists, dizzying beauty, and ferocious love, Wild Dark Shore is about the impossible choices we make to protect the people we love, even as the world around us disappears.