Sometimes I feel that my English skills are too inadequate to convey the difference between what I find to be real quality on line fic’s, and the entertaining fic’s that only reach a second place but are still worth reading. So I’ve been thinking that I need some sort of grading system for my reviews.
The Athenaeum has a grading system based on a 10-scale in two different categories, but I don’t think that I need anything that fine tuned. Actually I don’t think that I need more than two or perhaps three categories. One for the top notch fic’s, that’s the fic’s that I’ll save and read again, those are what I think of as “keepers”, another one for the fic’s that I find entertaining enough to hold my interest right to the end, I like to think of those as “the no fast scrolling” kind, and then you have the rest. Among the rest you find the fast scrolling kind, the bad ones that I won’t even scroll through to read the end, or the ones that have a theme, style of writing or something else that just don’t agree with me. Well I properly don’t even need a category for this last kind of fic’s, as I won’t bother writing a review on those!
Well I guess that I have already set up my own private and quite subjective grading system! Give me a shout, if this doesn’t work from your point of view. Ok – let’s see how this is working – I have one of those “no fast scrolling” kind of fic’s for you – it’s penned by Bibbit. This is the only uber fic that I’ve found by Bibbit, but I found a couple of Xena fic’s at The Pink Rabbit Consortiums Xena Fanfic Archive that you might want to look at, I haven’t read those as I’m not in to the classic Xena work.
“The Starry Sky” is what Kim (Kimba) has painted in her bedroom to look at at night to bring back memories of happy times spend with her childhood friend Julie out by the local lake. A time of close friendship that was brought to an end when Julie decided to cast away shared dreams of a future, to marry John.
The story takes up twelve years later when Julie decides to leave John, who has proven himself to be an abusive husband. Julie ends up at Kim’s door asking for a shoulder to cry on, and a chance to renew the friendship that she has allowed to fade away. As this is an über romance, I guess that it’s quite natural, that Kim has been unable to forget about her childhood friend or to let anyone else into her heart, so Kim is quite willing to rebuild the friendship and to help Julie pick up her life. “The Starry Sky” is the story of the rebuilding of the friendship and of Julies slowly emerging acknowledgement of her romantic feelings for Kim.
The flow of the story is nice and slow with none of the sometimes way to fast “falling into each others arms and having hot sex” kind of thing – come to think of it, there are no sex at all, unless you count kissing, cuddling and the likes. The story is mixed with a bit of drama as Julie’s ex husband don’t take her leaving kindly, and with a slight bit of bigotry, but nothing that will really get you worked up. All in all an average über story that kept me well entertained except for the fact that I found Julie’s 12 year old son Jesse to be all too wise and understanding for his age.
As for the writing I guess that I get a tad irritated with the “green eyes look into blue” kind of thing. I know that I can’t really blame the writer, as this is a declared über, but I for one wouldn’t mind if it was kept to a minimum. I do think that a good quality über can convey the characteristics of the protagonists without referring to the physical features again and again.