!! NEW RELEASE !!
by Tara Brown
"Lost In La La Land"
Genre: Science Fiction, Romance, Suspense.
Release Day Price: $1.99 ebook (at time of post)
What if you could enter the world created inside of your favorite novel?
Close your eyes and live for a day as Elizabeth Bennet or Harry Potter?
Experience every magical sentence ever written, first hand?
Escape the ordinary and live the extraordinary!
That’s the sales pitch for Dr. Emma Hartley’s dream machine, Lucid Fantasies.
The fantastical machine transports people into their favorite novels or movies, for a day.
It allows them to live as their beloved characters did, savoring the slow kisses, frightening vampires, or magic as if it were real.
Letting them forget their worries and get lost in a world of fiction.
But that wasn’t why it was created.
The dark purpose of it lies within Dr.Hartley herself.
A secret, a flaw in the machine.
One that she keeps hidden away.
For some people, your greatest fantasies are also your worst nightmares.
And the line between them is finer than we think.
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My Rating: 
My Thoughts: Seeking Heaven But Creating Hell
Tara Brown has done it again! This brilliant author has crafted a novel that is Jane Austen meets The Matrix and Inception. This story illustrates how love can be complicated but loss adds a new level making anyone search for a cure to their heartbreak.
In the year 2024, neuroengineer Dr. Emma Hartley’s has created a dream machine to allow people to live in their favorite books. Lucid Fantasies is Emma's company where she lives vicariously through her clients delight in using her machine, to escape their mundane lives and enter a world of blissful fiction. But when a client shows signs of addiction to the machine and it's escape of reality, Emma begins to question if what she created is as safe as she once believed. Looking for a flaw in the machine may prove her undoing as Emma begins to find herself questioning what is the difference between reality and fantasy.
Overall, brilliant-maddening and thought provoking read, if you've read Tara Brown novels you know this can be an accurate contradiction. The main character is a tragic hero, and yet the villain of her own making. Emma's own brilliance becomes her downfall with her trying to right wrongs and find that happiness she lost, when something new just needed to be found. My absolute favorite line from Emma was "My cheating and sneaking into heaven to retrieve my heart, ended up sending me to hell. And the reward for surviving hell was the light that had brought my heart back to life." Absolute loss can bring about absolution and a new start, and it only took Emma a whole 3 million renovation to figure out her new life. Now besides the emotional depth in this novel I must say I loved the concept of walking into your favorite novels and living amidst the story. I'd pick an Austen novel or Bronte sister book maybe even a Dickens classic. Either way probably a good thing Emma's machine doesn't exist or there'd go my savings in a few days. So if you're a fan of fiction and understanding grief makes us reach for anything to make us feel that love again then you'll be interested in Emma's journey of discovery.
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EXCERPT
Chapter 2:
Manhattan, New York, 2025
Lana’s eyes lingered too long on the poster, before she finally spoke, “I’m ready, Emma.” She lay back in the chair, relaxing. It was the same as always for her, the mayor’s wife, Lana Delacroix. She never changed up her story. She came daily some weeks and always stayed as long as she could. The service had become something I had to book for the wee hours of the morning or after everyone had left, so I could fit in other clients.
Every time she arrived she seemed happy and paid her money, which essentially was all I asked of anyone. But no one came nearly as often as she did.
She had started a year ago, telling me she was obsessed with Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell and needed to feel the book come to life the way it did when she read it. I told myself she was simply lost in the gowns and glamour of life before the Civil War. I told myself she hated her marriage and enjoyed living a dream.
Maybe I lied to myself a little.
Lana slipped her hands into the gloves that monitored her vitals as the forearm clamps clicked into place.
The microbiosensors, glowing pale blue and pulsating softly in the syringe, were pushed into her arm under the clamp when I pressed the start. I placed the mask over her eyes, putting her into a state of light deprivation. It helped with the dream.
The microbiosensor computers resembled a dot, or a tiny cluster of explorers under the skin, flashlights all pointing in the same direction. The moment my fingers touched the screen, starting the Gone with the Wind program, the nanobots deployed. The glowing small blue dot under her skin was gone.
They hurried to attach to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of her brain, hijacking the area, creating the world from within.
When we sleep and dream, our bodies go "offline” for lack of a better word. The primary motor cortex and primary somatosensory cortex are disconnected, so to speak. Since all dreams come from within us, my nanocomputers hooked into the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex with the story already programmed. The whole system was linked to a virtual world, based entirely upon a novel. There had to be a base of control. Early on, I discovered when people were put into a dream, completely in their control, it usually involved nightmares.
We were slaves to our own fears.
No, the journey required a controlled environment where patients were placed into a world they knew and were comfortable with. They were limited to a select group of options, centered on the base story within their chosen novel.
My research had its humble beginnings as deep-brain stimulation for patients with severe disabilities and disorders. Being a romantic and a widow trapped together in the same body, clashing and fighting each other’s desires, prompted me to find a use for my life’s work. Neuroengineering had so many opportunities as far as careers went. However, watching Lana’s face when she entered the world created by a beloved author made them all seem so bland.
My system still improved the lives of the disabled and diseased, but in a whole new way. It not only gave them their families, but also the option to leave all that behind and enter a made-up world from the books or movies they loved.
Inside a work of fiction was a type of beauty we didn't have in the real world. It was mixed in a balanced way with chaos and romance. It was planned to be perfect. A precise amount of pain, pleasure, beauty, and horror. It was specifically what you desired, and that escape was in a controlled environment. Real life was nothing, compared to the possibilities I had brought to light with the technology.
If all you truly wanted in the world was to storm the beaches of Normandy or kiss Mr. Darcy, you could. The book set the parameters, but your actions allowed changes within the novel. I had set it up as a Choose Your Own Adventure, using the same concept as the children’s series I had found in my grandmother’s cellar when I was a girl, but I kept the possibilities for change limited. Back then, I had loved the idea of choosing my own possibility and outcome. Sometimes I died. Sometimes I lived. Sometimes I won. Sometimes I lost. But no matter what, when I opened the book the real world was gone.
As an adult, I saw the need to limit personalization, to avoid confusing reality with fiction.
All of life’s mundaneness and boredom was replaced by excitement and possibility.
In the worlds created by authors there was hope.
But in the end, it was fiction. A true escape. No repercussions or costs.
In a story, nothing was like the real world where the pain was forever and getting past something was impossible. Your wounds might eventually hurt less, but they would never leave you. They would kill you slowly, a type of disrepair never to be righted. The journey in a novel was the opposite: over the minute you opened your eyes or closed the cover.
I sat back in the recliner, closing my eyes and letting my brain wander, and as always, my thoughts turned to him. In my heart of hearts, I wished someone would write the story of our love, and I could live there forever. A story that ended differently than ours had. A story that included the thousand things we had planned for and not the one thing we hadn’t.
If I were any kind of writer I might have done it.
Being a scientist, this was the closest I could get to a happy ending.
But it would never be my happy ending, not my real one.
No.
I never entered the machine.
When I started the original testing of the idea, I discovered that people with my level of loss should never enter a world where they could rekindle their lost love. My one test subject, whose children had been killed in an accident, went mad, obsessed with being inside the machine again and again and again. She lost her zest for life. She lost her desire to be in reality. She became depressed when in the real world. I knew, from the moment I turned her away for the last time, I could never enter the machine.
No, my happy ending was helping people like Lana who were lucky to have only normal amounts of boredom in their lives.
Her worst problem was her loveless marriage to her asshole husband, the mayor of New York City, Marshall Delacroix, jackass extraordinaire and not a fan of my shop, Lucid Fantasies.
Not a fan of me in general.
His wife had been a client for a year, and he had tried to stop her from coming for the last four months.
Lana was a nice woman who deserved better than someone like Marshall. She deserved a marriage like mine.
A smile crested my lips as I remembered our wedding day, our beginning.
It was perfect.
Sort of like our end.
Perfect.
Perfect irony in a perfect disaster. . . .
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