A Canadian teenager discovers he has an incredibly rare ability... and that all gifts have consequences. Includes an appendix with glossary and maps.
Size: 270 KB (49,447 words)
Genre: Mind Control
Sex Contents: Some Sex
Tags: Ma/Fa, Fa/Fa, Mult, Consensual, Mind Control, Romantic, BiSexual, Fiction, Interracial, First, Masturbation, Oral Sex, Petting, Safe Sex, Slow, Violent
Review by bill9900 [other reviews by bill9900]
Reviewed:
RabbiRabbit wrote a nice review of "Resonance" last week. He's right - this story deserves a much wider readership.
I'm not a child of either Islam or Judaism, so my focus is more on the quality of the story and its appeal to its SOL readers.
Demosthenes, the author, has done a wonderful job creating a premise, an appealing protagonist and a supporting cast to move the story along. I personally find it extremely appealing and watch for its posting so that I can catch up on the story's progress.
The essence of the story is that a single character is able, through a unique talent and extraordinary effort, to help people change their hardline perspectives and negotiate a solution to a problem that has been seemingly unsolvable for centuries. What better place to attempt this than in the Middle East! And he forms believable relationships with others in the story - in other words, the supporting characters are not just cardboard, but seem more fully fleshed out. It's more than just an action sequence, too, though the action pieces seem plausible to me.
The story clearly still has a ways to go, but I am hopeful that it will stand as one of the best stories posted on SOL once it's done. It's written in a clear style, with few if any typos or inconsistencies, and the plot is pretty ingenious. Hope you enjoy it!
Review by RabbiRabbit [other reviews by RabbiRabbit]
Reviewed:
I really like this story. A lot. (Disclosure, I have corrected some of the Hebrew for Demosthenes, it sounded like he was speaking with a mouth full of marbles. :-)
Mind control in this story is not about getting laid or about modifying some poor woman's body or mind so she is a sex slave. The sex in this story is understated and mind control has nothing to do with it. His scenes of Israel and the Gaza Strip are right on; his depiction of Shin Bet (literally, S'day Betachon, Field Security), Israel's internal security branch are also painfully accurate.
The story however has a purpose, the main character has a noble purpose. The problems in Southwest Asia are not new, nor are they easily solved. The far eastern Mediterranean littoral has always belonged to whoever could conquer and hold it: Canaanites, Israelites, Persians, Greeks, Israelites again, then Romans, the Greeks again, calling themselves Roman, then Arabs, the Crusaders, then Arabs under a Kurdish leader (Saladin), then Mongols and Mamelukes fought over it, then the Ottoman Turks took it, then the British, now Israelis. Pretty fucked up and there is no easy solution.
Israel is faced with three choices and can have only two: A Jewish State, A Democratic State, or All the Land. One must keep in mind, as Demosthenes points out, leaving religion and politics out of it, it is all about land and water.
Today it is also about rising sea levels over the next forty years. Something there is about rising seas and forty years that sounds almost biblical.
The story is not finished and I have no idea if our hero and his ever so convincing voice will in the end win out. I do know that my grandson is currently in the Israeli Army and more than ever I want a peaceful and just solution...or his grandson will find themselves shooting at the grandsons of people he shot at, just like my grandson is doing.
I am no longer going to use numbers to rank the stories I review, I think without an agreed upon common set of values for stories that the numbers are really a personal statement more than a key to a wider audience One of the neat things about SOL is that the cream rises. Regretfully, this is not always true. There are simply not enough people reading this story and it is not being given the respect it deserves.
