the realdoll girl
Oh. God.
So I'm listening to The Windup Girl because, you know. I heard it was pretty good, as these kind of very detailed imaginative post-apoc cardboard people kinds of novels go. And I am a little uncomfortable with the portrayal of Chinese and Thai characters and cultures, but it's ... well, OK, that's not entirely my fight, but I'm uncomfortable with it in the first couple of chapters, and hoping that the ~ exotic-and-corrupt thing with its incomprehensible politics and people's motivation being primarily greed or poverty or ambition for advancement of family/clan ~ kind of resolves itself and gets more complex. And by the third chapter, when the main guys have been established, we finally get to the female title character.
And she's a goddamned sex slave. And our introduction to her is a salaciously detailed scene of violent sexual humiliation.
And I'm just ... no. This is not going to get any better, is it?
It's not even moving very fast yet - no heart-stopping tension of any sort. At least the Dragon Tattoo series had that going for it, and strong emotional relationships pretty early on.
So I'm listening to The Windup Girl because, you know. I heard it was pretty good, as these kind of very detailed imaginative post-apoc cardboard people kinds of novels go. And I am a little uncomfortable with the portrayal of Chinese and Thai characters and cultures, but it's ... well, OK, that's not entirely my fight, but I'm uncomfortable with it in the first couple of chapters, and hoping that the ~ exotic-and-corrupt thing with its incomprehensible politics and people's motivation being primarily greed or poverty or ambition for advancement of family/clan ~ kind of resolves itself and gets more complex. And by the third chapter, when the main guys have been established, we finally get to the female title character.
And she's a goddamned sex slave. And our introduction to her is a salaciously detailed scene of violent sexual humiliation.
And I'm just ... no. This is not going to get any better, is it?
It's not even moving very fast yet - no heart-stopping tension of any sort. At least the Dragon Tattoo series had that going for it, and strong emotional relationships pretty early on.