That’s not to say sleepy stories are bad but this work is far from action-packed.  The execution of the story as a whole is made in through four different stories interwoven around this one little town that aren’t necessarily sequels to one another, but lightly interlaced together to form a believable connection.  While the tales aren’t fantastical or guns-blowing with action, the voice and the plot is intriguing enough to keep reading.

The writing is quite good but sometimes a bit meandering.  The portion of the portion I read, The Applegate Trail, is a blogfic and I think the balance struck between blog and story is a good one although it leans heavily towards the story-telling side rather than the blog side.  I often forgot that I was reading someone’s "blog" and not a first person narrative online novel.  The line is blurry but it’s one of the better blogfic stories I’ve seen in terms of style.

I like the newspaper articles scattered throughout the chapters that relate to certain events being mentioned.  It’s just enough insight to what’s going on in the background (or really, what’s already happened) that gets you itching to keep reading.

I had the biggest problem with the formatting.  I reviewed this story a while ago for another site and then I mentioned the odd characters showing up in the text, not to mention the spacing.  While the story is much easier to read now than it was then, the strange computer characters are still there and can be distracting to read.

Also, I’m not sure why the first few chapters of Applegate are broken up like they are.  The chapter as a whole is normal chapter length but they’re separated into pages of no more than a few paragraphs in length, at most.  I didn’t see the purpose of that.

Overall, it’s a very interesting story that’s quite well-written but it moves at a pace that’s a little slow for my patience level.  The voice is good and solid and very believable and I think it’s one of the main things that’ll draw the reader in.  The prose is descriptive without diving into naval-gazing and gives you just the right amount of information that you need to want to keep reading.  If you have the patience to read a story that works at a bit of a slower pace but want something good to read, take up The Germaine Truth.

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