Dan’s an engineer living in an RV park during a construction project. Cindy is thirteen, living with her trashy mom in the same park. Dan knows his job. He knows his life. He doesn't know how Cindy will be part of it.
Size: 1541 KB (290,280 words)
Genre: Romantic
Sex Contents: Some Sex
Tags: Ma/ft, Consensual, Romantic, Heterosexual, First, Oral Sex, Slow, Geeks
Review by orangeade [other reviews by orangeade]
Reviewed:
At least we know the kind of story that oyster50 enjoys . . .
A contract engineer, living out the second act of his adult life, is thrown together with a teenaged girl whom he rescues from an unfortunate situation. She shares his love of classical music, and shows a surprising academic aptitude, out of line with the circumstances in which he found her. He's good and decent, and tries his best to act in her best interests, but their sense that they belong together takes hold of both of them, and sets them on a path toward a very close relationship.
We know that oyster50 likes this kind of story because he wrote it three times . . . in the same story.
Reading "Cindy" isn't as simple as committing to one long story. At various points, you'll be drawn into reading two of oyster50's other stories -- "Christina" and "Nikki" -- as the three narratives eventually intertwine.
There's a lot here that's good: if you like gentle, romantic stories with little in the form of relationship angst, oyster50 is your man. They're more sweet than lustful, and though there are a fair number of mildly descriptive sex scenes in each story, they never really tip from "romance" to "erotica."
Also, oyster50 writes with a genuine-sounding voice. Southerners can sometimes come across stereotypically in online literature, but these stories, set in Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee, have a very honest feel.
Any serial has two lives at storiesonline, the one during it's initial posting, when new chapters are appearing at intervals, and the one that comes after, when the entire story is available for non-stop reading. And that's when problems crop up for "Cindy" and its two companion stories. There's a lot of repetitive material in all three, both in general themes and similar scenes. They tend to be sweet in nature, and in small doses read over a period of months they're not too overbearing. But it's almost impossible to imagine reading these stories now, available as they are from start to finish, without doing a LOT of skimming.
The other problem is that when you winnow down all the repetition, there really isn't enough story left to support literary works of this length. Which is a shame, because oyster50 writes in a very enjoyable voice.
Ultimately, the reader has to make his or her own choice based on the type of story desired. Those who require a well-paced plot will likely not be satisfied. Those who love a heart-felt romance will likely forgive oyster50 his literary excesses. And that's fortunate, because delving into his latest story, "Community," -- which follows the lives of the nine main characters from "Cindy," "Christina" and "Nikki" -- can't really be appreciated without reading the stories that came before.
