Review: Better than I thought it would be
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 10 5, 2012
Warning: This review might contain what some people consider SPOILERS.Rating: 7/10PROS:- The author does a good job of making her main characters likeable right from the start. Within a couple of scenes, I was already commiserating with Travis, and it took only about three pages before I really liked Gary, too.- Many of the conversations are painfully, awkwardly blunt. They seemed realistic to me: the dialogue in this story is not all witty and well-phrased.- I don't have a clue as to whether or not the details about the porn shoots are true to life, but they fascinated me--from the setting, to the people involved, to the events that occur...and everything in between. Those scenes struck me as simultaneously exotic and no-nonsense.- The sex scenes here are pretty cleverly done: the fact that all of the sex is being filmed allows for Gary to do some really corny dirty talk that I didn't have to roll my eyes at, because I was able to reason that it was his character saying it, not him.CONS:- Some things in the story seem to happen quickly because they're not told in much detail. This means not only that scenes sometimes fly by in a whirl of surface description, but also that we don't always get a lot of insight into the characters' thoughts or feelings.- The word "make-believe" is one that I don't use often because for some reason I think of it as a juvenile phrase; I use "fantasy" or "invention" or something similar when I talk about imaginary things. So the use of that word as a mantra was starting to get a little annoying to me as early as about 20% into the story. And it went downhill from there; that word probably appears at least twenty times.- There's a three-year-old character with a speech impediment who appears toward the end of the story, and the author spells out all of her dialogue phonetically, which I hate: "I wike dat stowy. I wike dat dey wivved hapwy ever after togevuh."Overall comments: I must admit that I started this story with a bit of a groan. Very early on I had an "oh, please...not another straight-boy-realizes-he's-gay-after-having-sex-for-money-on-camera story!" moment. The whole porn setup is very businesslike, though: not seedy or shady or gross at all. And by the end of the story, Dalton had somehow convinced me to believe that there were real emotions between the two men. I ended up liking this far more than I expected to.