Jack Pierce learns about love and life in his freshman year at an exceptional college preparatory school in beautiful Charleston, SC. Gifted with a thirst for learning and a love of challenges, Jack makes major decisions that set the tone and course of his life.
Size: 2477 KB (506,851 words)
Genre: Romantic
Sex Contents: Much Sex
Tags: Teenagers, Consensual, Fiction
Review by pj [other reviews by pj]
Reviewed:
Coming of age with a difference. Young kids with mature judgement. Well off, but with feet on the ground. So much so, you might think they were sent back for a do-over.
Yet believable, apart from a few anachronisms. Mostly technical.
Well written and interesting in plot adventure layout.
Although I certainly wasn't in that financial or social strata I did know a few people like that in the mid 20th century.
Review by bill9900 [other reviews by bill9900]
Reviewed:
Danny January is one of my favorite authors here on StoriesOnline.com. When he published his ‘Beach House - a Week With the Musketeers’ stories in 2020, I wrote a review praising them as superb, and beautifully written.
This story - ‘Feasting with a Silver Spoon’ - is very different from those, but is also an excellent read. “Feasting” is about the coming of age of a teenager in the Charleston, South Carolina area as he evaluates and decides how he wants to live his life. The story is very long (43 chapters; 506,850 Words) and readers have enthusiastically given it a very high rating, currently 8.99 as of this review. If you like well-written stories, with few typos, and characters who come across as real people, you’ll like this one!
The main character, Jack, has some real advantages since he goes to a private school that provides a top notch education, particularly if the student is self-motivated, as Jack is. And to some extent his internal discipline is a bit over the top for a normal teenage boy. I suspect it is difficult for a mature author to sound exactly like a real teenager some years after the fact.
What Jack has been missing, though, is a father figure to help him how to learn what is needed to become a good man. His original father was a jerk and left while Jack was very young. His later stepfather Ronnie was a good guy, but mostly lived to work and make money rather than become involved in the lives of Jack and his 10-years-older brother, Franklin. Ronnie died when Jack was young, and though he left Jack’s mother a lot of money so they could maintain a high standard of living, he was never really there when the kids were growing up.
One theme of the book is that Jack’s older brother, Franklin, now 24, has decided to step up and spend time with Jack to help him develop and mature. Jack is an eager learner and Franklin shows him how to study effectively for his years in high school and college, how to fish and play baseball, how to box, and talks about the mysteries of sex and girls.
Other characters become involved in Jack’s life as he works on becoming a mature teen and, eventually, an adult. Some of these characters come into his life from very different angles. Besides his mother, Jack spends time helping a widow neighbor, Mrs. Dietrich, who tells him stories about her husband and how couples need to be attentive to each other. Franklin’s fiancé, Karen, offers to talk to him about the mysteries of women from a female’s perspective and explain some of the situations. A young woman in a sex toy store gives him and his girlfriend advice on what works, and what doesn’t. Most of the characters in this story have real depth; they’re not just cardboard cutouts.
Danny has a real talent for writing scenes that bring out the depth in interpersonal relationships and emotionally affect the reader. The setting (subtext) of ‘Feasting’ is also rich, with intimate detail about Charleston and the South. Either Danny has spent a lot of time there, or has done a hell of a research job to know about local places such as the Wappoo Cut. I think you’ll really enjoy this story.
