Potential book tip for Dollhouse fans

[Taake]

Greetings fellow Dollhousians! 😀

So, I study a lot right now which means that I have a ton of less-than-exciting textbooks to read and usually, to alleviate that, I will get some more light-hearted or easy read books to have on the side. The other day I was at the library and I picked up a book called "Slated" about which the back blurb says;

"Kyla's memory has been earsed, her personality wiped blank, her memories lost for ever. She's been Slated" ​

Sound familiar, no? Obviously this brought my mind straight to Dollhouse and I thought how interesting it would be to see a similar topic treated in someone elses hands so I got the book.

It should be noted, for those of you who find it a turn off, that this is a Young Adult novel. This didn't stop me because there are plenty of entertaining YA novels out there, though one will have to take into account that like most of them it lacks a certain literary finesse and depth.

Anyway, I thought I'd mention it here as a tentative booktip for those of you who don't mind YA novels. Tentative because I haven't finished it yet so I can't say with certainty that it's good. What I can say is that so far it's kind of a mix between Dollhouse (wiping or 'slating'), Hunger Games (not as dystopian but there are hints of there having been 'terrorist' uprising in the 2020s and presently in the book), and Stephanie Meyer's The Host (as there is a threat of conforming or being pursued).
At first it was a little bit hard to get into because just like Dollhouse it struggles with the fact that the main character doesn't actually know her own past or who she is, which makes it hard to connect with her. What I find really interesting is that storywise it is essentially wiping and putting people into a Doll state and then, with them aware of this, they are expected to re-learn how to live life after having been sheltered at a non-confrontational hospital facility initially after the 'slating'.

Kyla kind of reminds me of Caroline/Echo only younger, being as how she is different from the other Slated (she has memories and nightmares she's not supposed to have) and the only real problem I have with the book so far is that Kyla, slated/wiped at ca 15 years of age (in the book 16) was supposedly a terrorist before all this (also mentioned on the back so not a spoiler). A 15 year old terrorist seems a little far-fetched to me but I'll go with it because at page140 something I'm really starting to get into the book.

Anyway, the idea of a Doll learning to cope with real life is interesting enough alone to me, and if it is to you too then the book is called "Slated" and it's by Teri Terry (lol, what a name)

🙂

 

[Fuffy Baith]

That's sounds like an interesting story. Let me know what you think when it's over. Sounds a bit like The Maze Runner too. Losing your memories and having to start over as like a test. I read young adult books so this my be something I would like. Definitely has some parallels with Dollhouse. Was it written before or after the show aired?

 

[Still a Scoobie]

Was it written before or after the show aired?

Please don't go there, I still have flashbacks to the Vampire Diaries debate. 😀

 

[Ethan Reigns]

There is a whole lot of "me too" writing out there. This is most obvious in Harlequin romance writing where the writer changes the names, the place, the professions and other extraneous details and resubmits the same story as a new story. We once had an English major brought into our engineering department because our manager (who was a reasonably good writer himself) needed someone to ride herd on those of use who were doing business proposals. English was not the first language for many of them and others just sucked at writing. The English major said that some of the Harlequin writers could do five or six books a year at $40,000 per year (and Harlequin was based just east of me in Toronto). That was big money back in the early 1980's when he said that and it still is. I asked him why he hadn't done that and he said that to write these stories, you had to live and think that way and he didn't.

BTW I was one of the better writers and it was interesting to see chunks of my own writing in other proposals on projects that I had nothing to do with. Cut and paste is a way of life.

It comes down to a deeper problem in the arts - there are only a few basic plots and they have all been done to death. We keep seeing lawsuits launched about music being copied in songs because someone had either deliberately or inadvertently copied something from another song. We see television programming that copies whatever else worked once, most recently, reality shows. My own (rather unpopular) theory is that the arts have minimal creativity, science by definition pushes boundaries, so it has more creativity and mathematics has the most creativity - you can create spaces with properties that don't exist in the real world but at some point may have some use, for example, designing a music synthesizer where you define an instrument by resonance equations and can take power out of it without decreasing the volume of the sound as would happen with a natural resonance.

 

[white avenger]

A 15 year old terrorist seems a little far-fetched to me but I'll go with it because at page140 something I'm really starting to get into the book.

🙂

Not necessarily. In Viet Nam, we had kids much younger than that involved in what would be called terrorist activities. They're actually easier to recruit than most adults because they have less real world experience (Have someone that they trust tell them that all Americans are monsters, and that by simply delivering a small package to a local bar, restaurant, hospital, or whatever they can help run those monsters out of their country, and they don't hesitate) plus the real terrorists consider them more expendable than better trained adults. Who's gonna suspect a sweet, innocent looking kid of being any kind of a threat?

All acts of terrorism aren't committed by hard core adult fanatics. Tragic, but true.

 

[Ethan Reigns]

I made a mistake in my post above - the going rate for Harlequin was $40,000 per book, not per year. At that time, five or six books a year could let you buy a house in cash in one year.

 

[Taake]

That's sounds like an interesting story. Let me know what you think when it's over. Sounds a bit like The Maze Runner too. Losing your memories and having to start over as like a test. I read young adult books so this my be something I would like. Definitely has some parallels with Dollhouse. Was it written before or after the show aired?

Published in 2012 🙂

I'm really starting to enjoy it now. It may have elements of other familiar and successful narratives but it feels like it has its own voice as well.

 

[Taake]

Well, there must have been something to it cause I finished it yesterday already 🙂

It didn't rock my world but I will definitely read the next book in the series before I make a final judgement. Judging by other reviews I've read I think Dollhouse has given me a leg-up for this kind of narrative because there are a lot of complaints that the lead character Kyla is kind of dull - and I'm like of course she's dull - she's a doll! Her insights come gradually and kind of slowly but at the end of the book I feel certain that there is potential for a good follow up. A bit like the first episodes of Dollhouse, the ground work is not that fascinating but once Man on the Street comes around you'll be glad you stuck with it 😉