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From: Peaches and Cream  <peachescreamreviews@yahoo.com>
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Subject: {ASSM} {REVIEW} Peaches and Cream Reviews: #23
Date: Sat, 24 Aug 2002 15:10:02 -0400
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Hi! We're Peaches & Cream. We're just two ordinary Joes who like
reading and romance. Recently, there was a Summer Solstice Romance
Festival on ASSM, and it caught our attention. We started discussing
the stories and our reviews were born. Our format is simple: one of us
starts the review, the other chimes in, and then the starter finishes
it off. Because this is all about romance, we'll be scoring with 0-5
kisses. We're changing our format to include more than one story per
issue. There is a website devoted to the festival where you can find
all the stories we will review. 

http://www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/Rui_Favorites/www/RomFest

***

Peaches & Cream Reviews: #23

Love comforteth like sunshine after rain.
- William Shakespeare -

Stories to be reviewed:

The Price of Seduction by Dryad
The White Knight by Pred
Sweet Julie Brown Eyes by Kenny N Gamera
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Price of Seduction by Dryad
(MF, oral, cheat, trag)
http://www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/Dryad/www/price.html

***

Peaches:

A woman feels trapped in a damaged marriage and finds love outside of
it. 

There's something beautiful about this story and yet, there's
something missing. There's very little that helps us understand what
pushes the woman into the other man's arms. And there's even less to
help us understand why she chooses to stay in a loveless marriage.
There's the mention of ideals, but by way of reason, this seems pretty
flimsy. If we're to believe that ideals are what keeps her married
then we need more proof. After all, her ideals don't keep her from
cheating.

But as I said, there are beautiful moments, as evidenced by this line:

>He nodded almost imperceptibly, silently taking what she silently offered...

This story reminds me of "Bridges of Madison County." I never
understood why that couple stayed apart either.

3.5 kisses

***

Cream:

I don't think it's a completely loveless marriage, but the woman's
husband is aloof, distant, and the marriage is far from what she wants
it to be.

>But inside, she seethed. Yes, her husband loved her...in his own way.  
>He never let the walls down, always maintained that safe distance; 
>never entirely trusted her.  Even after 5 years and a child. People who love
>each other don't try to knock each other down, but raise them up.  
>The years of putdowns were wearing out her ideals, even though she still
>struggled to keep them. 

Now and then some clumsy writing creeps in.  It happens often enough
to keep the story from flowing the way it should; for example,  "But
raise them up" in the passage above is clearly wrong.  The story does
flow, though, like a dark river or an old song, a ballad, one I can't
quite remember the exact words to but can da da da the melody.  It
sweeps along with lots of feelings, though the way I remember it the
feelings are too often told to us.  In the end they add up, and
there's a power to the narration, and we do want these people go
connect, to explode together. I wonder if it was the best strategy
then to start out with them fucking. Maybe the idea was the have the
final conflict whether they could make a life together, and that's
laudable, but I think much is lost by knowing in advance that they're
going to have sex.  Maybe the story should have started in the car
ride just before that, when she's trying to make that important
decision.  By the way, it took me two reading to understand how
exactly they got in that car together.  Once in the car the story
picks up pace, though it goes to a known destination.  The reader is
closer to the scene; I like that more than the sweeping history of the
first half. What might follow the sex is I suppose what we should be
most interested in. The conclusion is handled well enough.  I don't
know why I don't feel it fully compelling.  

For me the most influential part of this story is a tangent to it: I
can't help looking at the husband and wondering if my partner thinks
I'm too much like him, if I am too often aloof, too often distant, too
self-contained.  It's something I must find out and fix. It's
something I must work at every day.

3.75 kisses

***

Peaches:

I like your suggestion, Cream. I think this story could be made better
by leaving some question in our minds. Can this couple get together?
And if so, what happens next? That's more interesting than using the
idea of lost love, unless there's a better reason why you have to lose
that love.

***

Peaches: 3.5 kisses
Cream: 3.75 kisses
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The White Knight by Pred
(Rom Fest, MF, Inter, voyeurism)
http://assm.asstr-mirror.org/Year2002/36988

***

Cream:

This is the story of Katie and her younger sister, two middle school
girls, and the night they try to fix up their favorite Uncle Stephen
(who is not really their uncle but their godfather) with a beautiful
young black prostitute. Uncle Stephen watches the two girls every
Friday night while the girls' parents go out on a "date," and on the
night of this story, Uncle Stephen, who is a minister, decides the
girls need to go on a mission--a do good mission.

The more the story went on the more I enjoyed it.  It's fun, it's
often funny, it's a little sappy, and it's easy to read. There is one
especially neat ironic touch--foreshadowing that ... well, I don't
want to say. Oh, and the sex scene is very hot.

The story is not completely flawless.  I'd say the introduction goes
on a little too long and yet we don't even find out until the very end
of it that the narrator (the younger sister) is a girl, nor do we find
out until then exactly how old the kids are.  At first I thought
despite all the UPPERCASE, that these were high schoolers. A few times
they do seem a little too old and too wise.  Generally though the
voice is believable; the more you follow these characters the more you
want to believe them.  Even the UPPERCASE abates--or maybe I just
stopped noticing it.

An endearing, joy-filled fantasy.  I'm sorta  hoping there will not be
a sequel.

4.8 kisses

***

Peaches:

I didn't have the same feeling as you, Cream. I felt all along that
these youngsters were young adolescent--their choices of music,
movies, slang, etc. all clued me in. I say youngsters because I
thought for quite awhile that the narrator was a young boy, not a
girl. But my misconception didn't keep me from enjoying the story. 

There's an overall feel-goodness. The goodness of people, and the
innocence of children to believe that nothing bad can happen when
they're doing something right. 

There are a couple of things that nag at me. First, the dialogue tags
started to almost get funny--I challenged, Katie added, Katie
demanded, Pine huffed...the list goes on.  A few less of these and a
few more, he said, she said, and the reader wouldn't even notice.

Secondly, Uncle Stephen is practically a saint in these girl's eyes,
and he is a minister. So it just doesn't sit well with me that they
rescue a prostitute only to turn around and Uncle Stephen, the saint,
have sex with her that very night, minutes after the girls have
scooted off to bed. Of course the girls don't go directly to bed, they
sit and watch. It's an innocent watching, and it's handled
exceptionally well both during and after the sex. But that's beside
the point. It seems that for a very long story, the sex was rushed at
the end, even to the point of being inappropriate. If an author is
going to invest this much time in a story, then it's worth the effort
to finish it as cleanly as he started.

Of course, those are just nagging points. And yes, Cream, the sex was
hot. But I might have liked it even better if the author had found a
way for these girls to discover Uncle Stephen and Yakeesha at same
later date. Say maybe, the next Friday.

4.25 kisses

***

Cream:

There's something to be said for your suggestion of "next Friday,"
Peaches.  There's a lot of potential in that. But it didn't bother me
at all that Uncle Stephen and Yakeesha connected that very night--in
fact it seemed fitting. If I were going to suggest changes to the
story (and I'm not at all sure it needs changes), I'd probably want
the author to do something about the introduction.  I wouldn't want to
lose most of the "stuff" in there, but couldn't the author find a way
to give us that stuff as part of the "real" story? I think I'd prefer
that the story officially ends at the end of the night. Having an
introduction as such puts the narration at a certain distance, a
distance in this case beyond the end of the story, and in retrospect
it's a little odd.  We get our "happily ever after" at the beginning,
which is kind of neat, but it might be neater if we didn't have it
handed to us at all. Anyway, when it comes to the ending, a week later
might be too late; I think I prefer the glow of the moment.  And what
a nice glow it is!

***

Peaches: 4.25 kisses
Cream: 4.8 kisses
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sweet Julie Brown Eyes by Kenny N Gamera
(FF Ist)
http://www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/Gamera/Games/Sweet-Julie-Brown-Eyes.txt

***

Peaches:

A grad student--Kendra/Kenny flunks out of a class, and finds solace
at a girlfriend's house. Fortunately, for Kendra it's the girlfriend
she's been eyeing for months. They watch a bad Godzilla movie and one
thing leads to another.

The story is difficult to read. It's in bad need of good, strong
editing. There are brief moments of tenderness from Kendra who is a
professed lesbian but still a virgin. But having read the story first
before seeing the coding, I felt it took too long to find out Kendra
is a virgin. You're 2/3 into the story by the time it's first
mentioned and by then, it seems plopped into the story for no apparent
reason.

With some powerful editing, this story would have more potential and
maybe live up to its very nice title.

2 kisses

***

Cream:

I suppose sometimes finding out someone is a virgin can be a nice
surprise, Peaches.  Here it was a bit of a surprise finding out the
narrator is a woman. It's not that the writing led me to believe the
narrator was a man, more that the narrator was without sex.  Strange
for a sex story.  Beneath all the writing problems, the amorphous
people and amorphous goings on, there does seem to be the core to a
genuine story of a real character on the verge of a real relationship.
But it just doesn't come out. Not even close. The story does lead me
to believe that this writer's heart is in the right place, but that's
the most I can say for it.

1.5 kisses

***

Peaches:

At the end of this post the author states this is his attempt to write
FF, further stating that there is some discussion about men writing FF
stories, and women writing FF stories. I think you state it best,
Cream. There's a real androgynous feel to the narrator. I didn't get a
feel for male or female, and except for the name, Kendra, I might not
have known she was a female until the unveiling of genitalia. But I'm
nearly certain I would have been just as surprised to find it was a
man. The character seems genderless. It's hard to say if this is the
author's intent. But personally, I would have preferred a little more
definition of character.

***

Peaches: 2 kisses
Cream: 1.5 kisses



 

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reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.
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