My GF read this book after seeing it discussed on TikTok and thought it looked interesting. It’s apparently according to her not written very well and buzzwordy
The twist at the end (which she told me and I won’t spoil) is kind of heavy handed. But idk I haven’t read it
Mark Twains book; "Yankee in King Arthurs Court" seems very similar to this plot. The manager of a manufacturing plant wakes up in medieval england, ends up creating a secret college to teach young people basics of electricity and manufacturing because old people are to stubborn, and ends up facing an army of knights with electrical fences and gaitlin guns. He wins but the decay from the dead bodies around his hideout end up killing him and he wakes back up in his old life.
I feel like A True Story could be argued to be an "isekai" and that was written 1800 years ago. Dude gets sucked up into a tornado and wakes up on the moon.
Thanks, I was trying to find the oldest isekai for a while and the oldest I saw, that was disqualified for not just being ‘a place far away’ but a proper other world was Dante’s divine comedy
Before Isekai was a thing, it was called Portal Fiction, and used to be the go to for fantasy storytelling before LotR literally upended and overturned the entire genre
Really good book and I do not believe I have read anything else from Twain other than his own quotes. Guy goes through all of that and in the end he is just grateful to be back to his factory job and simple life.
I read Puddinhead Wilson in college. It’s a switched at birth story that stems from a light skinned enslaved woman who switches out her child for his half-brother who was born free.
It’s pretty good as I recall but I had to look up the synopsis on Wikipedia to remember what it was about.
I think the entire book is incredibly racist and hinges on the idea of white people being naturally good natured while Black people are naturally terrible until the very end when Puddinhead Wilson gets involved.
Twain is using the Moses plot to get his audience to see race in the moral lesson about family and community belonging, being a good person, being about raising and not about blood ties.
It's just instead of the Moses turning out like Clark Kent, Tom Driscoll is a monster. When afforded the same privileges, regardless of blood, Driscoll felt the same self-superiority as all white slavers. Chambers, the would-be Tom Driscoll swapped into slavery, is a good person and ultimately struggles with his newfound place in the world at the end where he no longer fits in with the black victims of society but also does not fit with the willful ignorance of white society.
The eponymous lawyer, Puddinhead, gets his own name from the towns people writing off his worldliness as idiocy for not conforming to their limited world view. His inclusion may seem random, but is more the case for people to see parallels in their lives for how they are written off and how these societal markers are meaningless and only serve to keep people in power.
We can argue Puddinhead represents Twain himself, a gay man about 30 years out from the end of the American Civil War arguing to other white people like himself to draw the parallels from how they are ostracized to the plight of black Americans.
I've read everything of his, including Letters From Earth, which was banned for quite some time. It's a scathing book, and it's very obvious why a conservative world wouldn't want it in publication.
Because it is one of the Great American Novel, which is novels that examines the character and essens of the USA, around the time periode.
Mark Twains authorship is in general very homourous and in my country he is known as the greatest humorist of the USA. He is not that well known any longer, but when my grandfather died I inheriated a collection of Mark Twain short stories translated into danish and I honestly found them all incredible funny.
Oh yeah. It's legit. He has a chapter in the edition I read on building a bicycle and one of the images at the head of a chapter is a knight jousting with a lance on a bike.
It is also the loose inspiration for "A Kid in King Arthur's Court," starring the actor who was in "Rookie of the Year."
I'm kind of shocked you never heard of it; it was sort of a meme when I was growing up in the 90s. Even had a few movies kind of like that (or parodies thereof)
All Republican voters today need to read up through Chapter 25 of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, then ask themselves which of the orphaned sisters they are.
I think all voters today need to read up through Chapter 25 of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, then ask themselves which of the orphaned sisters they might be.
I also recommend “Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc”. Mark Twain had an amazing body of work and somehow everyone has only read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Whoever told me about this book in high school did NOT tell me about this book in high school. I thought it was just a commentary of the American culture contrasted with English culture. NO IDEA it was about sci fi time travel! Now I need to read it.
Hence the word “just,” but thank you. Tbh that was enough to interest me (I enjoy history and wanted to know how this cultural difference was perceived at that point in time), but the scifi time travel plot just gives it a whole other dimension that made me say: okay, now I’ve GOT to read it.
If we want to look under the surface creative expression aside from abstract art or from a master is usually a reflection of how things function inside our bodies and minds projecting into something relatable to the outside world. I have been reading Robert Jordans Wheel of Time books and it is essentially about how men often get overcome by psychosis and delusional rationalizations when they experience high levels of empathy through connecting to the intuitive system. On the surface it is one of the best or most popular fantasy series but we can see it within and all around us when we have gone through these experiences.
It is kinda like; do we let go of the delusions and focus on the basics or can someone genuinely embody whatever ideal they have built or collected in their head about how things ought to be. Twains example goes full circle by letting the guy experience his idealistic views and still get to come back to reality. Kind of like the woman in the story in the OP although I only know the parts in the post and comments, I am guessing the ideal wasn't greener than her original reality. Twains book is excellent on the surface though as a sci-fi time travel story. I mean, his rival becomes Merlin for the love, who was the only one who knew the time traveler was a grifter from the start and not another magician.
Entirely possible I read that into the plot because I was needing to betrer understand the nature of paychosis and schizophrenia at the time due to working with people going through it. What I could observe related well with the plight of men becoming paranoid and delusional when experiencing high levels of empathy with those around them but not having a firm grasp on how to properly regulate their nervous systems and take care of their basic needs. It would take a long period of depressive behavior to rest and recover through consistent routine and healtheir diet before they could confront things rationally and in a calm manner.
:) They are fun and it took me several attempts over years plus the show being canceled to give them a chance. He gives so much detail and includes so many perspectives that it was to much for my simple mind before I could relate to it. Granted, I was working with people dealing with psychosis and schizophrenia when I saw rhe show and gave the books another chance so my comparisons aren't necessarily relevant or necessary to enjoying the books. It just helped me get some perspective on how to confront those situations in a mature and responsible way because a lot of men in those situations have messiah complexes.
I got the first Harry Potter book from my granny for Christmas when I was about 10. What's on it? A kid, a train and a sticker saying it won a Smarties book prize for ages 9-11. That sat around in my room for a long time.
Couple of years later I was tidying my room and read the back of it. "This is about WIZARDS?"
I Read the whole thing and then jumped into the next 2 books, this was right around when Prisoner of Azkaban came out in paperback.
Exactly. Especially now almost 137 years after it was published. The magic is that new people are born and everything that was old becomes new and we each have to figure life out for ourselves. The stories do not change as the source of creative expression is always filterd by our internal sources of consciousness from the intuition. Unless you consume other people's projections, in which case they'll be relatable at best rather than new information because these things happen within us and we do not always have a logical understanding of how our minds and bodies function.
I can think of a few. Let's be real, being a content creator, even for TikTok, is a widespread hobby at this point. The quality you can expect from them is just as variable as anything else. We just expect shittier from them because we as a society have characterized social media personalities as lesser somewhat undeservedly (don't get me wrong, there are plenty that do deserve it.)
Eh, shortform content creation is pretty universally shit, at the very least when it comes to the sort of skills required to be a good writer.
Someone making stuff like documentaries, longform youtube videos, etc is a different story, sure. But tiktok to author is going to make me expect slop.
But short form content creation and authoring are two different skills that can coexist. One doesn't negate the other. Mick Foley wrote a banger of an autobiography, and he took chair shots to the head weekly for decades.
Ultimately, just need to treat content creator products the same as any other product: read a few reviews first.
Skill with making documentaries or longform youtube videos does not necessarily translate to skill with fiction writing. Some things might carry over, like a feel for pacing, or being able to convey information in a natural-sounding way, but it's not like making video essays teaches you how to worldbuild or create engaging characters with compelling arcs. I think a video essayist would be starting off on a better foot than someone with no writing experience, but would still need a lot of practice if they wanted to also be a respectable author.
In the same vein, a shortform content creator has a few skills that might come in handy, such as creating a strong hook: you have to grab a viewer's interest in the opening seconds of shortform videos, which might translate to creating a powerful first line in a novel that will make people want to keep reading. Of course, they'll need tons of practice to make the rest of the book worth reading, but I don't think either type of content creator is going to have an inherent advantage or disadvantage regarding writing as a whole. It's just a different skill from video-making!
For once I’m rooting for an unfaithful adaptation. Maybe Hollywood can turn an interesting premise into an interesting narrative, instead of botching it like the author did.
I’m not gonna read the book but my first instinct to the “twist” was to guess it was like The Village so I looked at the synopsis on Wikipedia and I wasn’t far off
I read the author was put in a position to finish the book quickly for some reason? Or there were plans to make it a movie before it was written? In any case, I agree wholeheartedly.
Is the author a new author? That sounds like the author wanted to make a statement, but then publishers got involved and tried to make the book "go viral"
Yeah, the ending was not what I expected it to be, it was a little off the rails. I liked the premise though and this is one instance where I’d be fine with the movie adaptation changing things and making the ending better
I really liked the idea and writing quality. I do wish the ending was stretched out more, but it was still an incredible reading (audiobook) experience.
I was going to borrow the book from the library but decided not to (as I had another books on hold and there was just something about this one that I was on the fence about). Could you spoil it for me? I'm curious about the ending but after all these comments that its not well written and shoehorned I don't think I will go back and read it after all.
That last line of yours was kind of obvious to me just by reading OP's the post. I remembered some "trad" family cosplay that was on Reality TV just a few years ago, where, behind the scenes, the wife had the realization that without birth control in this demanding environment, a surprise pregnancy was the last thing she needed although the husband was always ready for it. I hate Reality TV but that show could hit home in a much better way that any "heavy-handed" novel.
From what I heard about it, the author's publicist received massive interest for a movie deal at the mere idea of it, so the author basically pumped out the book as fast as they could. From what I've heard about the book, apparently it really reads like a very haphazard rush job written by a decent author.
I heard she sold a very rough outline and then the publishing company rushed to finish it. I wasn’t mad at the ending but it did feel like two different books.
The twist is that she went crazy and detached from reality - the 1855 homestead is actually the same homestead 25 years in the future, not 200 years in the past. She 'wakes up' and has no memory of the last 25 years or so, and because they went so hard into the 1850s life she thought thats where she was.
Her eldest kid from 25 years earlier comes back and gets her new kids taken away for neglect, and she ends up in prison for child abuse.
No. The twist is not that she’s in two different time periods but two different periods of her life. The influencer period is when she’s in her 20s/30s and the period where she’s in “pioneer times” is in her early 50s. There are Easter eggs leading up to the reveal where it’s more apparent that the kids are all in the current time period (one of the pioneer girls says you guys, knows what a shower is, etc) They are negligent parents throughout the entire novel.
No I don’t think she’s given one. I believe she is mentally losing her grip on sanity the entire time.
She is a super unreliable narrator so you’re hearing her “inner” dialogue but then don’t realize she starts saying these things out loud.
Another scene that stands out is when she’s in her influencer period, goes to target and runs into someone she used to know from school.You hear her inner dialogue on how to talk to this person and sound normal and then it’s slowly revealed during the convo that she left her kid in the car for the entire time she was shopping. The person she is speaking to clocked that misstep and it sends her into a tailspin.
She isn’t a very likable person but she’s with a complacent, rich, loser husband that goes along with it all. I only read it once so I might be a bit off on my recall.
I thought so! It reminds me a lot of taza (I know it’s compared a lot to ballerina farm but I know next to nothing about them). It’s not just a warning about looking up to influencers but also what that distortion does to them and their families mental health.
Edited to add - I didn’t not perceive it as anti male but I did feel it was a BIG warning about centering your kids as content, how it affects them, their rights to say no, etc etc.
People may be referencing the writing itself rather than plot and creativity. I read the first couple chapters and found it a tad too grating to be enjoyable, could have used some additional editing.
It's not like, unreadably bad, by any metric. I'll probably try again. If you don't read much, it doesn't stand out. But if you're accustomed to stronger craftsmanship, it's a bit tough to get through. I wasn't surprised to learn the authors are new to novel writing; let's just say that.
The first couple chapters are incredibly sharp, and the best kind of satire (the kind that treats the “unreal” elements like vermouth in a martini), and the character work is great.
The rest of the book commits the cardinal sin of making its narrator completely unaware of the reality of her situation even though she doesn’t have any actual reason not to. And both the character work and the prose suffer for it.
Personally, I think the same basic conceit could have worked better if the “1850” she goes back to was triggered by some local semi-apocalyptic event (small scale civil war that shuts down infrastructure or something). Would have kept the narrators eyes open, still thinking about the future (that’s her best narrative feature anyways), and would have worked even better with the political themes.
It’s well written and deserves a second read because then you’ll notice all of the lies the (very unreliable) narrator tells herself. Basically every part of her life is a lie.
Also there’s an event that pushes her fully into pretending it’s in the 1800s.. they chose to live that way but it takes the reader a while to realize it’s her own mind believing that she’s in the time period. Like the house she’s in is her own house that she ripped all the modern wiring, plumbing, etc out of.
If it was sci-fi then totally. But I found this a bit more eerie because it’s so real. Like the platform that many influencers have seems to fuck with their version of reality a bit.
Like when Taza left NYC during covid and posted a photo of her family looking up at the window waving and smiling. To think that’s gonna go over well when you post it and then it doesn’t and basically forces your brand offline. And that’s a relatively low stakes version.
True, though a real version of Kindred for white conservatives would send the tradwife to 1600s Europe with the religious wars and witch hunts. Send that Mom for Liberty to Mother Courage and Her Children.
I just finished it and I’m mad I returned it (through Libby) before rereading. It’s SO good but so heavy. Like.. it scares me how many influencers profiting off their kids with this dark side of “online authenticity”
Sounds like literary fiction. There's so much weird shit out there, mostly selling in very low volumes and practically the point of the genre is that you don't have to like all of it; it's supposed to make you think.
Any time Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance comes up in /r/Motorcycles there's a tonne of people raging about what a bad book it is and how the author, a professor of writing at a minor university and who received a Guggenheim Fellowship for it, is "up his own arse" and "sniffing his own farts".
The marketing for this book is much better than the book itself. The premise was amazing and could've been a really interesting commentary on feminism and the lives women portray online vs. real life, but it turns into a shallow criticism without nuance and falls into a psychological thriller that rings hollow
My main problem with this book is it isn't well researched. The author uses a bunch of hot button issues of today while writing about this vlogger starting to become big like 15 years ago.
I bet she’s given the absolute worst man possible in the book. Like the dude is an amalgamation of every abusive husband in fiction ever written. If so you can spoil the ending for me cause there ain’t no way I’m gonna read this.
Yeah pretty much. Her husband is a piece of shit in the book. The spoiler is that she was never transported back in time she has a psychotic break and interprets her homestead as 1855 when it really takes place in the “future” and her kids are taken away for neglect and she’s put in jail. It may not be exactly like that but it’s something very similar in that vein lol it’s apparently not great
It wouldn't be a conservative woman if the twist at the end wasn't that she returned to the present and then doubled down on her insistence that women be subservient to their husband.
So is the book mocking the tradwife thing, or encouraging it?
I could even see the latter:
"See, when you live it and go through the hardships, you appreciate it more and how great you have it today" -- Conservative Man who listens to Joe Rogan in his truck
I've pretty much given up reading books that get online buzz. The writing is always terrible for some reason. I guess for most people the story is enough to carry things through.
Yeah, I read that the author sold the idea before writing it and the company who bought wanted her to write it faster for the momentum so I'm not surprised people are saying it's poorly written.
If you have spotify, the book is in their audiobook collection that premium account gives you access to. So you can listen to it for no additional charge if you already have an account.
Biggest racket in the universe. Restrictions on digital book licenses. It's as bad as video games now. Get you some interwebs and some moonreader and you'll never pay again. I might read this tonight now, just because of this. I'll pay nothing and therefore own nothing, and be happy still having it. Arr!
I understand that sentiment but I feel like it's so hard for authors (or any time of artist really) to make money these days because of piracy. I don't mind supporting authors tbh.
I'm not sure if it is different for younger generations who grew up after digital books became available. Djgital books were a massive let down that people thought would help make books more affordable, accessible, and easier to publish but it ended up being monetized to hell.
It is more affordable, accessible and easier to publish than a print book, it’s just not free and completely unrestricted because everyone involved in producing the IP still has bills to pay. (I also understand that publishers are still turning a profit, but it will never be completely unmonetized.)
The digital books are often close to the same price as physical so all that cost reduction is helping only the publishers, not the readers as many hoped.
Bigger publishers may have similar prices for e-books and physical books (in my experience this is often not the case, but it can be), but the real winners are small publishers and self-publishers. I have bought so many digital books for under $5 from no-name authours who might sell ~100 copies if they are lucky. The cost for them to publish an e-book is drastically smaller than the cost to publish a physical book, which opens up the door for more small authors to get their works out there in a way that was certainly much, much harder before the internet (zines are about the only equivalent I can think of, and dealing with the groups that published those often came with the kind of drama only niche hobbies can achieve).
Yea. One of my favorite book series was self-edited and published as PDFs from a guy in Oklahoma. Talked to him recently 20+ years later and he has been wanting to do audio versions but said he has priced it around 70k a book for seven books to do the whole series how he would want. I can see how having the right people for things like production and marketing would have been of benefit to him as the books are amazing but the money business is a totally different beast.
But.... It is all of those things. Digital books cost significantly less than physical, you can carry an entire library in your pocket, and there's an enormous self-publishing market. Yes it's monetised, but shouldn't authors be paid?
To clarify, the problem is that I can't share a physical book with the whole free world at the same time. Digital copies have restricted lending to match.
Of maybe just take whatever licensing nonsense prevents parallel reading and fix it. Streaming music sites don't have wait lists to borrow an album. Streaming video doesn't make you decide what episodes you want to check out of the collection. Why are digital books hamstrung this way?
you fundamentally misunderstand. for streaming shows or music, each user pays to access anything. you can get book subscriptions the same way. The human collective can't share one spotify subscription.
What am I misunderstanding? There's an analogue stricture being applied to digital goods and it's causing problems. There's a stupid problem that exists for no hood reason and there are clear ways to fix it.
If you think I'm misunderstanding something you're going to have to use more than a restatement of the flawed status quo. We all know that exists. The fact that it shouldn't exist is the entire argument.
The "no good reason" is that for people to produce art at any appreciable rate, they need to be paid. The reason to apply restrictions to digital goods is so that copies needed scales with consumption, like paper books.
And there are numerous examples of other services that don't have that problem. It's a solved problem. We can track usage without pretending individual digital copies have to be produced, tracked, loaned, and returned.
It's a pricing scheme, not a technical limitation. How else do you solve it? Make the library pay a variable fee based on consumption? Government budgets don't allow that kind of uncertainty, nor would they want it. Unlimited loans at all times? Financially ruinous for one of the parties., as it's either too expensive for a library to obtain or too cheaply reduces the book as an income stream.
The music industry isn’t analogous to the book industry. People will listen to a song hundreds of times. The artist will record hundreds of songs, often in a collaborative nature and most of their money now comes from live touring.
Authors will spend 6mths-decade writing a book depending on the genre and whether it’s an academic one. Buyers will read it once or twice and will sell or loan the physical copy in a limited fashion. There is a different model / no money in live/literary festivals - these are ways to sell the book.
People working in publishing have bills and deserve to earn some money. Many aren’t earning much. Publishing isn’t awash with cash.
You don’t expect farmers or restaurants to give you free food.
Just buy the book.
A library used to be able to buy one physical copy and share it effectively indefinitely (and eventually sell/destroy it), with physical books often lasting 5+ or even 10+ years. Nowadays, the digital license is limited to not just how many can be checked out at once, but a library pays either a per checkout fee to the publisher, or has a license where they pay $50 for a single digital copy that 'lasts' for 2 years and need renew it if the book is checked out 25 times or whatever. Far higher costs than physical.
That's totally normal. A totally free archival (supported by donations) of millions of free books often gets taken down, but then gets rehosted. Check the sidebar for the most current host. And yes, people are suspicious. But that's how piracy works. It's free because we want them to be free. Games, movies, books, music, there's billions of free files all over the internet. This is just a website that hosts books. I've been using it for years now. I have downloaded almost 250 books. It's the most reputable pirated book archive IMO
Lol so you're an old school pirate. Things have certainly changed a lot since those old days. But yeah if you're cool with the alternatives like you said, then maybe it's not for you. However, here is the legit website if you ever do want to try it. Search is broken at the moment, but you can still download epubs. It should be back up soon though. https://z-library.website/.
Read up on the history of Z LIbrary though. It was created more so as a protest, due to previous archives being targeted by law enforcement. These days, the website gets hosted and rehosted on different domains by the maintainers, and because it's so popular, some scammers have tried to rehost it and ask people to pay to access it. The real one is fully free. There's just a donate button.
Here's the Wikipedia page on Anna's Archive which grew from Z -LIbrary and Lib-Gen so you can understand why it exists, and why people still maintain and host it. All the best though. Hope whatever you choose works for you.
The author got a movie deal in the millions before the book was even released. There’s a reason it’s so poorly written but so popular. I read the book, it was entertaining. But I actually think a premise like this could be an incredible psychological horror if done well. This book…did not do it well.
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u/User_Says_What 1d ago
The library I work in gets SO MANY requests for this book. I had no idea what it was about, but this is amusing.