by Stephanie V. (link)
Genre het, romance
Pairings Isaac/OFC, Taylor/Natalie, Zac/Kate, Zac/OFC
Length prologue, 25 chapters and epilogue
Status Completed
Imagine, if you will, a bingo card for all the typical tropes in hanfic. Within the first few chapters, Hearts Will Bind You hits a bingo — from the Hanson song inspired title to a group of fans (named for the author and her friends, no doubt) just happening to run into the boys. Between that and the poor formatting and grammar, I’m not impressed.
There’s a saying about how fiction has to make more sense than reality does. In the case of Hanson and their love lives, fiction needs to be less cliche, too. I’m amused that this story begins not unlike how Isaac actually met his future wife, but I’m not interested in reading that story over again. I want the fanfic I read to have more drama than that, but it’s hard to create drama in chapters as short as the ones that make up Hearts Will Bind You.
Stephanie does, however, stumble upon some interesting ideas about what it would be like to date a member of your favorite band, trying to keep the relationship secret and so on. But with such short chapters and scenes that often feel like summaries more than real scenes, the ideas never go quite as far as I wish they would. If she’d fleshed the story out a bit more, lost some of the cliches and learned how to format the dialogue… well, it would have been an entirely different story, and a better one.
Review by Bethany (website)