AUTHOR: Gabrina Garza
PUBLISHER: Amber Quill Press (Amber Heat)
LENGTH: Short story (roughly 10k)
GENRE: Contemporary erotic romance
COST: $3.00
Carleena Benningfield has spent the past seven months watching the career she built as a party planner go down the tubes. Now, she’s watching her mother’s house for a couple weeks, trying to regroup. When Ben Pinato, her best friend from high school, shows up at her mother’s instruction to house sit, Carleena is shocked to see that the geeky boy she adored twenty years earlier has grown into a hunk of a man. Is it too late for them to find a new, adult relationship? Or has too much time passed to find that old connection?
Some issues within the first few pages made it a little difficult for me to engage with the characters quickly enough. First of all, the story opens with Ben spying on Carleena through the window, watching her in the pool from her bedroom. The first few pages are devoted to backstory, where the reader hears about his lifelong feelings for Carleena, and Ben jerking off while he fantasizes about her. I don’t have a problem with a little bit of voyeurism. My problem stems from two things - the fact that Ben feels very teenagery at the start instead of a 36 y/o man because of these reminiscences, and that his supposed best friend throughout middle and high school didn’t even know he was present at their last high school reunion. This doesn’t gel for me when I get Carleena’s perspective later on, because I’m left wondering, If they’re such best friends with secret feelings for each other, why didn’t she at least seek him out at the reunion?
The sex scenes are written well enough, but I’m never as engaged as I would like to be because of my lingering questions. Once I get a chance to know the grown-up Ben, I do like him quite a lot, more so than Carleena. I’m even rooting a little bit for the happy ending. But in the end, the story needed to be longer for me to overcome my initial doubts. As an erotic nibble, it’s pretty much just that for me.
| Readability | 7/10 – Some minor editing issues, but the same easy reading I’ve come to expect from this author |
| Hero | 7/10 – Likable though it took me a little while to see him as an adult and not the teenager fantasy he relives when the story opens |
| Heroine | 6/10 – The length prevents me from really getting to know her too well |
| Entertainment value | 6/10 – A nice distraction for a short story read |
| World building | 6/10 – I’m never able to get a real handle on the world of this, where it takes place or how they all manage to grow up in the same neighborhood if Ben’s childhood was as poor as they say it was |
| TOTAL: | 32/50 |
8 comments:
It's funny that shorts stories are rarely satisfying to the readers, and almost universally they get reviews that ask them to be longer, but publisher's continue to ask for them. Part of it has got to be that they're terribly hard to write. I feel like only 1 writer in ten can nail a story under 30k, and most of they are out there writing for red sage.
Just my two cents. Good review.
Short stories sell, I suspect, because readers like to read something short rather than a long epic novel on the PC or even reader device.
I know that Mrs. Giggles' comment is at least partially true. I read on the PC, html in a browser if I can get it, and all it takes is one wrong click to lose a window and then have to go searching for my place in a document again. Plus, I have kids that demand attention and real life stuff to take care of. Sometimes reading short stories is just easier. I can still get a romance fix, even if it's not necessarily the most satisfying one.
They're also very inexpensive and you can zip through them in less than an hour, then go read something else. They're also good for short attention spans, trips on the bus or subway (if you have an ebook reader), etc.
And yeah, they're a pain in the ass to write, but think about how popular micro fiction has become. Those are under a thousand words, many being under 500 words.
30k words is actually quite a lot of space to tell a story. 10k in under is the word count for a lot of contests, so they're being written and read. Think about magazine articles and fiction. Those are fairly short works for the most part.
Gabrina
I think a lot of things passing for short stories at the moment are more like scenarios. It puts me off reading them as I want a beginning-middle-end in my short stories which is as possible in a page as it is in a novel.
An interesting point, Emily. I think you're very correct.
Have any of you read No Choice by Adrianna Dane? It stayed on the best seller list for over a year at Amber Heat and is only 8k words. Curious to see what you think of that since I don't see it on here at all.
In regards to what Emily said, All Wet is part of a three story series. As it turns out, the second story in the series is about twice as long and might fill in a few more details. When read as a collection it will definitely feel more like a complete story than just "cotton candy" as B.U said.
Gabrina
hey, just thought I'd let you know my gay erotic romance comes out sometime tomorrow. :)
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