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For What It’s Worth

by Kris (link)

Genre het, romance, comedy
Pairings Isaac/OFC, Taylor/OFC
Length 18 chapters and epilogue
Status Completed

I went into this story completely blind, which is sometimes refreshing. My only impression going in is that Kris and this story are fixtures on recommendation lists from the early years of the fandom. That’s got to mean something, right?

The first thing I notice is that the narrator has a very distinct voice. If you’re going to write an original character, I think you really have to go in all the way, and Kris does. I can practically hear Haley narrating the chapters out loud.

For What It’s Worth takes a while to really get going. The first several chapters just set up the main characters and send Taylor and Haley off on a road trip to meet his family after a year of rooming together at college. Once the story gets going, it’s a fairly typical love story. I expected it to move into love triangle territory, but thankfully, it didn’t. The drama mostly comes from another boy and Haley’s family. There’s a cute little nod to hanfic in one chapter, a nice reminder that this isn’t totally the typical story for this era.

The worst I can say about For What It’s Worth is that it’s full of cheese, a few typos and some stilted dialogue. Overall, though, the writing is fairly good. I’ve never been a big fan of cheesy romance stories, but as far as they go, this is a pretty good one. It’s not too long, but not too short, and there’s just enough drama to keep things interesting.

Review by Bethany (website)