Tainted Lime Reviews Issue #8
January 20, 2002


Reviews are archived at /~TaintedLime/.

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Stories reviewed in this issue:

Crying Out Loud, by theGreatxIam (* * * * *)
Birthday Present (Version Two), by Laura Davis (* * * *)
Confessions, by Ann Douglas (* * *)
Daughters of Destiny, by Anon Sacto (* * *)
Taping wife, by Hnnyhbby (* * *)


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{ASSM} Silver Surfer #2: Crying Out Loud
By theGreatxIam <max_wojtylak@yahoo.com>
http://assm.asstr.org/Year2002/34743

Celebrity stories are a genre I almost always skip. While I watch
television, I don't watch it seriously, and when it comes to movies,
I have a hard time telling the difference between Julia Roberts and 
Sandra Bullock.

But you can't live in the United States without knowing more than
is good for you about Kathie Lee Gifford. And theGreatxIam
doesn't write your standard celebrity story.

In this story, we are treated to a male airline attendant who is
asked to take over the first class cabin when an unruly passenger
insists that she always has trouble with female attendants. The
passenger, it turns out, is Kathie Lee Gifford.

What follows is a wonderfully funny account of Kathie Lee
yammering about herself until she falls into ridiculously
self-indulgent despair. The attendant, of course, must comfort
the lady in distress, and the two of them become just another
tragic Mile-High Club statistic.

Now if you are president of the Kathie Lee Fan Club, you may not
like the way theGreatxIam pokes fun at your idol, but if you
don't mind seeing undeserving celebrities cut down to size,
you're going to love this story.


Rating: * * * * *

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{ASSM} Birthday Present (Version Two) by Laura Lynn Davis f/f romance
By Laura Davis <ldavis4@hotmail.com>
http://assm.asstr.org/Year2002/34759

This is a rewrite of a story I first reviewed in Issue #2. For
those who don't remember, this story is about a rich girl whose
daddy wants to buy her something nice for her sixteenth birthday.
Not only does the birthday girl get the expensive diamond
pendant, but she gets the girl who helped model it, too.

Most of the problems I had with the original story have been
cleaned up here, and the story is paced more evenly and the 
ending doesn't feel nearly as rushed as it felt in the original.

I think one factual inconsistency was introduced in this rewrite
(an uncle turns into a father), but that's a small point. This
is now a very nice story.

In the future, unless some unforeseen situation comes up, I will
avoid reviewing revisions of stories I've already reviewed. It's
too hard to look a story with fresh eyes after having read it
once before, and I do a disservice to readers by trying.

That said, I would encourage readers to take a good look at
revised stories in the newsgroup. Most stories, when revised, are
even better than before, so it's a good bet that revisions will
get you better-than-average writing.


Rating: * * * *

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{ASSM} AnnD"Confessions" FF (1/1)
By Ann Douglas <ann_douglas@hotmail.com>
http://assm.asstr.org/Year2002/34778

Jiang Li is a recent Taiwanese immigrant who is still under the
thumb of her mother; Kathy Wu's family is also from China,
although two generations removed, and Kathy is fully Americanized. 

These two unlikely friends go out for a night on the town, where 
Kathy confesses to Li that she earned her way through college
as an exotic dancer.

Li then has a shocking revelation of her own: she has consented
to marry the man her mother wants her to marry. This prompts
Kathy to pile on yet another revelation: that she loves Li, and
she doesn't want Li to marry that man.

Readers of ASSM should have a pretty good idea what happens next.

The grammar and spelling gets rough on occasion, but that is
just a minor annoyance. The bigger problem with this story is
there is too much plot crammed into too few words. In order to
get the story moving along, there are a lot of sentences that
summarize complex emotional situations. In many places, this 
story reads like a _review_ of someone's life rather than the 
_story_ of someone's life.

The author also appears insecure in her ability to define a
character in a reader's mind. Long after I set a mental image of
what Li looked like, the story jabbed me with extraneous physical
description. The length of her hair is tossed in half way
through the story, and the size of her boobs is repeated near the 
end.

There are stretches of this story that are very good, and the sex
is wonderful. The plot, too, is compelling and real. Even the
characters were well defined. But when the writing style got in
the way, the story bogged down. Which is a shame - with a careful
cleanup, this could be an extraordinarily good story.


Rating: * * *

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{ASSM} Daughters of Destiny (MF Mf 1st) {Anoninsac}
By Anon Sacto <anoninsac@yahoo.com>
http://assm.asstr.org/Year2002/34785

Destiny is a mother of two teenage daughters and a good friend of
Mike, the nice man who lives next door and lets Destiny's family
hang out at his pool. Five years ago, during a difficult stretch
in Destiny's marriage, Mike and Destiny had a little one-night
fling. Now that the marital problems are all patched up, the two
old lovers are just friends.

What Mike doesn't know, though, is Destiny's daughters witnessed
Mike and Destiny screwing that one time. And now that the girls are
almost all grown up, they want Mike to screw them, too.

This is a pretty good story. Grammar problems crop up
occasionally, and the prose is jerky in places, but it's not so
bad that you'll want to throw the story away in disgust. The plot
was so-so: a good excuse to get the older man in bed with the
teenage girls. There were a few small things that annoyed me
scattered here and there. For example, in the beginning, Mike 
makes a short speech about how older women are the sexiest women, 
and then later, when he's screwing the younger girls, the older
woman is forgotten and it's those teenagers that really excite
him. And I was bored by occasional cliched phrases. 

But this is a full step better than the typical older-man-teenage-
girl story. In particular, the girls are believable teenagers, 
unlike so many stories where the girls are brainless fuck toys 
with nothing in their character to differentiate them from a 
thirty-year-old woman. If you're a fan of the Mf genre (and I know 
there are a lot of you out there), you won't have a problem with
the small problems I mentioned above - you'll like this one a lot.


Rating: * * *

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{ASSM} Taping wife (MF, voy)
By Hnnyhbby <hnnyhbby@aol.com>
http://assm.asstr.org/Year2002/34787

This very short story is about a man whose wife has a fantasy of
being videotaped while having sex. The husband talks one of his
buddies into hiding outside the window and running the video
recorder while hubby gives Michelle's twat a nice tongue bath.

The wife is one of those the 38DD you read about too often in
these stories, and there isn't much of a plot. But the writing is
decent, the sex is decent, and there is a nice promise of things
to come.


Rating: * * *