A young man with a troubled past grows to manhood thanks to a few good women.
Size: 169 KB (33,889 words)
Genre: Romantic
Sex Contents: Some Sex
Tags: Ma/Fa, Consensual, Heterosexual, Fiction, First
Review by gmbusman [other reviews by gmbusman]
Reviewed:
“Once” is an interesting story. It’s about the guy who always came in last. It’s about the guy who resigned himself to being last. And it’s about the women he met along the way that helped him find that being last was not a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I have some problems with the story. They are not with the plot. The author does an excellent job of setting the stage, describing the action, and leading the characters through conflict and resolution.
My problems are not with the characters. The major actors are sufficiently developed that the reader is drawn in to the story. The protagonist is well painted in detail, an Everyman with the same feelings of inadequacy we all feel, but try to bluff our way through. Perhaps he’s a bit cliche, but in a work like this, that has to be expected, and is pretty much required to make this story work.
And it works very well, because the secondary characters are developed just enough to show their importance, without excruciating detail. Told in the first person, our hero can only relate to the heroes and villains as he sees them, through the eyes of a confused child, the eyes of a confused teen, and the eyes of a man who knows what he wants, but is almost self-assured that he’ll never get it.
Nor is my problem with the sexual content, graphic scenes of wanton desire, or outlandish sexual behavior. There simply isn’t any! And that point works perfectly to describe the hopeful but frustrated, self-labeled “loser” who narrates this story.
No, my problem is entirely in the construction of this work. Let’s start with the title: “Once Opon a Time in Emmittsburg.” “Opon” is the archaic, Middle English ancestor of “upon.” But there’s nothing archaic about the story. So that leads me to believe it was either an error in proof reading, or word selection. “Once Upon a Time...” would probably have been better.
My major complaint is lack of defined paragraphs. The author has only taken a break at scene changes or shifts in continuity. That makes the work difficult to read, and at times causes confusion when dialog could be miss-attributed. The run-on nature of the text is particularly difficult when you can’t even begin to see the end of the text block at the bottom of your screen.
In all fairness, the story is supposedly being told by a protagonist who may be mildly autistic. He freely admits that while he’s good in math, typical reading and writing lessons are a greater challenge. Since the tale is narrated in the first person, this may have been a convention by the author to convey that. But as the character develops and advances through his life, his mastery of writing might have better improved too, to make the tale more readable.
That said, if muddle your way through the run-on paragraphs, you’ll find little else to complain about. I have to rate this high on plot, and very high on appeal. I just had to knock off a bit solely for the aforementioned technical aspects. Still, read it! You’ll enjoy it!
