Reviewed:
This is a review of ‘Beach House - a Week With the Musketeers' by 'Danny January’. But it’s also a review of the four Musketeer stories that follow this one:
- August With Fallon - a Musketeer Story
- September With Luann - a Musketeer Story
- October With Tina - a Musketeer Story
- A Note From a Musketeer
Danny has written these on behalf of a friend - Michael - the protagonist in the stories. In all, the five stories document a time in the ‘70s as teenagers grow, fall in love, and learn to be adults and true friends. They’re based on real-life people, though names have been changed.
Every one of these stories is superb, and most are quite long, so you’ll get many hours of pleasure reading them. Danny is an excellent author, and has several other stories on SOL, but these are different. Frankly, they make me long for the kind of friendships that these characters are fortunate to have, apparently even in real life.
One could quibble that, written many years after the fact, the characters sound a little more mature than they might have been back when they were teens, and I wonder if a real teen could have come up with the real date scenarios that Michael, as a teen, supposedly came up with. But the timbre of the voices sounds right to me, even though I don’t actually know any of them. Or at least I think I don’t. I also lived in Costa Mesa, California, for 14 years, but it wasn’t until 1988 when I got there, and would have been older than any of the real people in the stories.
At the beginning of ‘Beach House’, I was really interested since I knew the street names mentioned in the story, having lived near them and driven them myself. But I quickly became enthralled by the stories themselves. Unlike many stories on SOL that are mostly about sex, kinky or otherwise, or action, these are about friendships, relationships, romance, and growing into adulthood. And you grow to love each of the people involved.
Beautifully written, I only wish I had had friends like these when I was that age, and beyond. If you like stories with an emotional impact, I guarantee you’ll like these. In fact, the rating limits are too low, on a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give these a 12.