Reviewed:
So, is this what happens when an author falls in love with his main character?
Oh, I'm not really suggesting anything about RPSuch (aka Peter Schulman) and his feelings for Ashley Fine, the young female first-person narrator of "Revenge of the Nerd." Any reader is likely to find her amazing and totally charming. But this was once a short and intriguing piece of erotica; in its new form, it's an 80+ chapter romance that smacks of wish fulfillment, the ultimate modern fairy tale for someone from the Philadelphia Jewish community. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
The question is whether or not it's better, for all the additional material. The earlier version is incarnated here as the first 11 chapters, a tale of a beautiful young woman of privilege, who accepts her ability to manipulate and use people through her beauty and poise as her natural right. She finds herself knocked off her bearings by a young man who both opens her up sexually and shows her how much more she can be as a person; only later does she realize that he's someone from her past.
The chapters that follow detail the rocky road that Ashley and her new love face to be together, both in terms of the acceptance of her family and her own growth. RPSuch is a fine writer, and he makes the journey enjoyable, through short chapters that are often self-contained, although one has the feeling that this works better as a serial. Now that it's all available to be read through, the story seems likely to drag a bit by the conclusion.
In the end, though, it's all about Ashley, and any reader can be forgiven for falling a little bit in love with her. RPSuch does make her take a step back in her development toward the end, in order to bring about the desired final showdown, and it does feel a bit forced. But it's all in the name of true love, so perhaps he can be forgiven.
For a story that was quite sexual in content in it's original form, there's so little in the newer material that it's unfair to rate the stroke factor at all. It's really more of a romance, anyway, and readers who enjoy that kind of story should definitely put this one in their queue.