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21 Erased
Sarah is an intelligent person; an architect. A difficult situation made her get a job as a cook in the government. She was happy to have a job, and a paycheck in a heavily unemployed country. She noticed the injustice, the violence and the hunger around her, but closed her eyes, lulled into security of her job. A friendly conversation in which she revealed she was not blind to the unfair system in which she lived, will show her that there is no safety for anyone who thinks. The codes on people’s hands serve as identification, the bank account, the credit card, the key to housing, the medical insurance. Everything! The code is life, without the code you don’t exist. Brutal humiliation by the police, her code erased, the elimination from life, shows just how deceptive her safety was. The system that tracks you, that owns you through your code, in one single day brutally takes it all away.
You don’t exist; you were erased, alive but as good as dead.
You don’t exist; you were erased, alive but as good as dead.
- GenresDystopiaAdult Fiction
Paperback
First published October 29, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
January 11, 2012
The initial concept of this story made me so excited to read it. I could not wait to get my copy and sink into the story. However, upon reading it I was dissapointed by the lack of emotional depth in the characters. Everything was told to me, rather than putting me into the scene directly.
A lot of the major plot points were revealed through stilted conversation between the characters - long monologues explaining or re-explaining things that happened, rather than showing them through character action. Also, I couldn't discern the differences in the characters since they all sounded the same. While having long conversations between characters works for reminding readers of things that happened earlier in the story, I felt with this particular story that it simply added to the lack of emotional depth.
The idea for this story is a great one and I still feel the story is good. But because of the lack of solid insite into the characters minds and hearts, I just couldn't fall into the story or relate to the characters on any level. The tension that should have been there fell flat for me. The story is there, it just needs 'more' to make it great.
A lot of the major plot points were revealed through stilted conversation between the characters - long monologues explaining or re-explaining things that happened, rather than showing them through character action. Also, I couldn't discern the differences in the characters since they all sounded the same. While having long conversations between characters works for reminding readers of things that happened earlier in the story, I felt with this particular story that it simply added to the lack of emotional depth.
The idea for this story is a great one and I still feel the story is good. But because of the lack of solid insite into the characters minds and hearts, I just couldn't fall into the story or relate to the characters on any level. The tension that should have been there fell flat for me. The story is there, it just needs 'more' to make it great.
November 6, 2012
21 Erased By Barbara Rayne, A Review
The chemically altered sky is always overcast and leaves the people with an incurable cold that chills to the bone. People drone on through the streets to complete their assigned tasks without unnecessary contact with others. Everyday maladjusted people are boarded onto trucks to be taken to the Adjustment Centers. The great majority of the population is unemployed and live day to day fighting hunger. Sarah, uselessly educated as an architect, has been lucky to find herself a job as a cook and coffee waitress to government officials. She goes through her day to day activities, following every command she is given, but secretly questions the motives of her employers and wonders what the world has become. Sometimes, Sarah is appalled by the naive ignorance of the people around her, tries to get them to question their unwavering belief in the government system that oppresses them, but never succeeds.
This is the story of how Sarah learns what happens when you speak out against your fascist government. Sarah, after confiding in someone that shared some of the same concerns, became a wanted person and was taken by her government and stripped of her personal identification code. Erased from the system, she has to learn to survive without being provided or able to purchase the necessities of life. She soon discovers an underground network of people like her, who have also been erased. Together they fight for survival, lurking in the shadow of their all-powerful former government.
Barbara Rayne writes this modern “1984” in a very staccato style that leaves the reader wondering if they accidentally skipped over some key facts earlier in the reading. Rayne on multiple occasions refers to characters in a dialogue or in an explanation as if he or she had been formerly introduced into the story when, in fact, they have never been mentioned and are new to the story. The first person style of the work gives the reader an insight into the mind and emotions of only Sarah and the short chapters almost make the work feel like a series of personal journal entries as day after day goes by.
There are some excellent ideas and concepts throughout the book that give details about the setting but they hardly last longer than a quick mention in a sentence or two. Often times I feel these prepare the reader to learn more about the context of the environment in which the story is set, but am left disappointed as Rayne never follows through with the details. At one point in the text for example, the narrator describes a dialogue between two men, “Two men started arguing about politics. One was against the war we waged, and the other one called him a coward.” But Rayne does not then go on to explain anything about the war; who they are fighting? Where they are fighting. Why?
Furthermore, the only character development is Sarah's. Most of the other characters are just cameo appearances and the secondary characters feel like they are just hollow shadows. It is often easy to mix up the secondary characters with each other and if there were any deaths or disappearances, they would have no emotional impact on the reader. I would like to also point out that this book was filled with numerous grammatical, spelling, and syntax errors that distracted the reader from the story in pure annoyance. For example, “Dorothy Mackenzie's voice got lost, so after a few moments, she muttered...”. Rayne commonly uses the technique of adding several extra vowels into words to add emphasis. While this may have been a good way to show emotion and importance to kindergarteners, this technique is poorly executed and quite frankly makes any mature reader cringe. “'Power, fool, poweeer!' the second one was gloating, eyes sparking.”
Given these numerous annoyances, I found this book very hard to enjoy and very easy to put down, even though it is very short. After reading 21 Erased, I look back and feel that I had just read a rough draft outline of a story that, with a lot of proofreading and expansion, could in-fact be very entertaining. Rayne takes the stereotypical dystopian universe and tries to convert it into one of her own, but I feel she does not bring the reader into her own developed ideas and fully take advantage of the great expanse of the human imagination.
It is very important to note that 21 Erased is a self published novella via Createspace publishing. Rayne has her own web-page which displays information on her current books and a short (and very uninformative) “About Me” section that isn't even written by her. In general it was very hard for me to find any information about Rayne. Her books however were pretty easily accessible and initial skimming of other reviews gave me some good hopes. I purchased her book on my Kindle and because it was so cheap I didn't think twice about it. After reading 21 Erased and being somewhat surprised at its unexpected amateur style, I went back online and took a closer look at some of the other reviews. What I noticed this time that I did not notice before was that most of the 5-star ratings were given by clearly good friends of or Barbara herself.
This is something that people (including myself) will just have to start getting used to in this new age of Print, where just about anybody can create a piece of work and Self-Publish it to the world. It seems that all it really takes these days is some good advertising (of which Barbara Rayne did a good job finding proficient artists to design the covers and even had YouTube commercials made for books) and a stroke of good luck to get a sucker like me to buy something.
With these things said, I do not recommend this book as it stands. I found this work frustrating and annoying as a reader that by no means is very educated in the art of writing. If this work were to be rewritten and expanded, I would consider reading it again.
The chemically altered sky is always overcast and leaves the people with an incurable cold that chills to the bone. People drone on through the streets to complete their assigned tasks without unnecessary contact with others. Everyday maladjusted people are boarded onto trucks to be taken to the Adjustment Centers. The great majority of the population is unemployed and live day to day fighting hunger. Sarah, uselessly educated as an architect, has been lucky to find herself a job as a cook and coffee waitress to government officials. She goes through her day to day activities, following every command she is given, but secretly questions the motives of her employers and wonders what the world has become. Sometimes, Sarah is appalled by the naive ignorance of the people around her, tries to get them to question their unwavering belief in the government system that oppresses them, but never succeeds.
This is the story of how Sarah learns what happens when you speak out against your fascist government. Sarah, after confiding in someone that shared some of the same concerns, became a wanted person and was taken by her government and stripped of her personal identification code. Erased from the system, she has to learn to survive without being provided or able to purchase the necessities of life. She soon discovers an underground network of people like her, who have also been erased. Together they fight for survival, lurking in the shadow of their all-powerful former government.
Barbara Rayne writes this modern “1984” in a very staccato style that leaves the reader wondering if they accidentally skipped over some key facts earlier in the reading. Rayne on multiple occasions refers to characters in a dialogue or in an explanation as if he or she had been formerly introduced into the story when, in fact, they have never been mentioned and are new to the story. The first person style of the work gives the reader an insight into the mind and emotions of only Sarah and the short chapters almost make the work feel like a series of personal journal entries as day after day goes by.
There are some excellent ideas and concepts throughout the book that give details about the setting but they hardly last longer than a quick mention in a sentence or two. Often times I feel these prepare the reader to learn more about the context of the environment in which the story is set, but am left disappointed as Rayne never follows through with the details. At one point in the text for example, the narrator describes a dialogue between two men, “Two men started arguing about politics. One was against the war we waged, and the other one called him a coward.” But Rayne does not then go on to explain anything about the war; who they are fighting? Where they are fighting. Why?
Furthermore, the only character development is Sarah's. Most of the other characters are just cameo appearances and the secondary characters feel like they are just hollow shadows. It is often easy to mix up the secondary characters with each other and if there were any deaths or disappearances, they would have no emotional impact on the reader. I would like to also point out that this book was filled with numerous grammatical, spelling, and syntax errors that distracted the reader from the story in pure annoyance. For example, “Dorothy Mackenzie's voice got lost, so after a few moments, she muttered...”. Rayne commonly uses the technique of adding several extra vowels into words to add emphasis. While this may have been a good way to show emotion and importance to kindergarteners, this technique is poorly executed and quite frankly makes any mature reader cringe. “'Power, fool, poweeer!' the second one was gloating, eyes sparking.”
Given these numerous annoyances, I found this book very hard to enjoy and very easy to put down, even though it is very short. After reading 21 Erased, I look back and feel that I had just read a rough draft outline of a story that, with a lot of proofreading and expansion, could in-fact be very entertaining. Rayne takes the stereotypical dystopian universe and tries to convert it into one of her own, but I feel she does not bring the reader into her own developed ideas and fully take advantage of the great expanse of the human imagination.
It is very important to note that 21 Erased is a self published novella via Createspace publishing. Rayne has her own web-page which displays information on her current books and a short (and very uninformative) “About Me” section that isn't even written by her. In general it was very hard for me to find any information about Rayne. Her books however were pretty easily accessible and initial skimming of other reviews gave me some good hopes. I purchased her book on my Kindle and because it was so cheap I didn't think twice about it. After reading 21 Erased and being somewhat surprised at its unexpected amateur style, I went back online and took a closer look at some of the other reviews. What I noticed this time that I did not notice before was that most of the 5-star ratings were given by clearly good friends of or Barbara herself.
This is something that people (including myself) will just have to start getting used to in this new age of Print, where just about anybody can create a piece of work and Self-Publish it to the world. It seems that all it really takes these days is some good advertising (of which Barbara Rayne did a good job finding proficient artists to design the covers and even had YouTube commercials made for books) and a stroke of good luck to get a sucker like me to buy something.
With these things said, I do not recommend this book as it stands. I found this work frustrating and annoying as a reader that by no means is very educated in the art of writing. If this work were to be rewritten and expanded, I would consider reading it again.
April 20, 2012
The book surprised me!The plot is full of suspense and so interesting that I can't remember when I enjoyed myself like this. Every page new intrigue, so logical and so interesting.I was particularly intrigued by the way the plot was revealed. I found myself traveling through Sarah's experiences and that made a special connection, so I was able to feel the injustice, and to see how it would be for me to live in such society. Through dialogues, the reader finds out just enough about the society and how it came to be that everyone was microchipped and I must say, I would probably be the one to fall for those traps just as they did. Devil in the details,eh?
This book is about human psyche, human emotions and predictable human behavior. One main character who finds herself in a heavy fascist society, intelligent, sees the injustice and makes a deadly mistake any one of us would make. She spoke about her view of the society at the private party and that got her in whole lot of trouble, and changed her for good. Everything happens so fast and as she is trying to connect the dots, so was I, as a reader, trying to get it myself. That contributed the the whole emotionally charged drama, she is confused, I am confused, she get's it, I get it, and there's no break, we're in more trouble trying to understand it all over again!
So much fun, I recommend it to everyone, it's 84 pages long and you'll read it in a single breath.
This book is about human psyche, human emotions and predictable human behavior. One main character who finds herself in a heavy fascist society, intelligent, sees the injustice and makes a deadly mistake any one of us would make. She spoke about her view of the society at the private party and that got her in whole lot of trouble, and changed her for good. Everything happens so fast and as she is trying to connect the dots, so was I, as a reader, trying to get it myself. That contributed the the whole emotionally charged drama, she is confused, I am confused, she get's it, I get it, and there's no break, we're in more trouble trying to understand it all over again!
So much fun, I recommend it to everyone, it's 84 pages long and you'll read it in a single breath.
January 20, 2012
I was really excited about this book. This type of story is usually right up my alley. However, I am sad to say I was disappointed after (and during) reading this book. There were countless grammatical errors, and also "intentional" errors that drove me nuts. It seemed as though the intentional errors were done for no other reason other than lack of experience by the author. I found myself wondering if I was constantly missing character introductions, but upon re-reading, there were no introductions at all. Characters just appeared out of thin air throughout the book. I wish there was more depth to this story, it could have been so much better with more effort and length (only 80 or so pages).
October 26, 2026
ديفيد كيج إذا كتب رواية
December 29, 2013
IT all started off so brilliantly but then tailed off towards the end. I was just left feeling a little disappointed by the ending.
February 12, 2012
This book was mess. It really suffered from lack of proofreading and a horrible translation. There were so many errors in the spelling, syntax, and English that it became difficult to read due to the distraction the horrible errors in the writing caused.
Great story concept but poorly executed.
Great story concept but poorly executed.
April 9, 2014
Two stars.
It was okay, I guess. And I'm kinda a little disappointed on the stories toward the end.
Lack characters developments, and there's a lot of hole in the plot.
However, I really like the main concept of the stories though.
It was okay, I guess. And I'm kinda a little disappointed on the stories toward the end.
Lack characters developments, and there's a lot of hole in the plot.
However, I really like the main concept of the stories though.
July 16, 2013
Ok. It didn't have the "wow" I was hoping for.
September 3, 2018
I liked this novella but it was more like the outline for a novel than a complete novella. It would benefit from more detail. Much was left unexplained. Maybe there will be a part 2?
May 27, 2015
gave up half way. boring.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews