Kyle Martin has to follow in his valedictorian, class president, year book editor older brother, Will Henry's very large footsteps. Kyle works on finding a way to meet the lofty expectations at school, make a name for himself in football, deal with the adulation and girls his on-field success brings and finding love with his friend and neighbor Penny Edwards.
Size: 417 KB (79,850 words)
Genre: Erotica
Sex Contents: Some Sex
Tags: mt/ft, Teenagers, Consensual, Romantic, First, Slow
Review by Andrew Johns [other reviews by Andrew Johns]
Reviewed:
In "Finding Balance" we read about Kyle, a 13-14yr old boy that plays some football, learns about sex, and tries to live up to the big shoes his older brother filled.
The story itself has a fairly good plot, but Kyle just didn't feel very believable. His height/weight/age ratios made him sound like a skeleton, and when a girl talks about his muscle definition when he is 6'4" and 131lbs, I had to shake my head. Kyle's reactions to situations felt fairly on-target for his age, which was a welcome change for a sex story involving teenagers. I didn't feel like I was reading about a 35yr old posing as a 14yr old.
The story is very slow to develop. Kyle's camping trip with his older brother and their friends is considered to be core to the story (see below), but it didn't add anything to the story except at the very end of it. The same with Kyle's scout camping trip. A whole lot of filler that I assume is supposed to make the story and Kyle feel more real, but added almost no meat to the bones of the tale.
Technically, there were no major errors, though there were some verb tense abuses in random spots. Nothing that should jar a reader out of story immersion.
This story isn't a stroke story. The sex wasn't big in volume, and was only of average intensity. Also, the author made a glaring error in the one vaginal intercourse part by placing the hymen 1.5" inside the vagina. That jarred me completely out of that scene. An earlier scene was refreshing as Kyle is refused intercourse because he has no condom for protection.
Overall, it was not too bad of an effort. The story is considered to be a stand alone story, but the 5th in a series of tales, at least according to the author's SOL page. Unfortunately, the author fails to group the stories using SOL's grouping method, and there is nothing at the beginning of the story to warn the reader that some background information can be found in earlier tales.
Maybe reading those other stories will make this one feel more complete, and make that really boring camping trip feel more worthwhile. Standing on its own, I found it to be not great, but not bad. A tighter plot with less fluff would have made for a better story.
