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.

In the modern world, the idea of going off-grid often sounds appealing. No more spam texts about unpaid tolls or emails asking you to rate your experience–imagine the peace and quiet! In What Kind of Paradise, that is Jane’s reality. It’s the mid-90s, pre-smartphones and dot-com era, and Jane is being raised by her reclusive father in the wilds of Montana. Everything she knows about the world, she has learned from him—a principled eco-warrior who wants to shield her from the outside world. But when Jane learns that her father may not be the good guy she’d always understood him to be, she sets off into the world to seek answers.

Jane travels to San Francisco, the city where her parents lived prior to her mother’s death. With only vague information about her mother or the circumstances that led to her father’s choice to renounce society, and with no experience of life outside the woods, Jane is thrown into the promise of perils of modern life. As she begins to see the world in all its clamorous and nuanced complexities, Jane must form her own opinions about right vs. wrong, progress vs. protection, and nature vs. technology.

What Kind of Paradise is a brilliant, thought-provoking literary tour de force that kept me questioning until the very end. If you’re looking for an unforgettable summer read, I invite you to take your first steps into the wilderness of Jane’s unusual world—you might just find yourself emerging with a changed perspective on your own life.