One of Us

Montgomery, a cheerleader, offers to pay some geeks to teach her about scifi and geeky stuff, to help her better understand her boyfriend.

The story was very, very predictable. Even if the general arc of the plot weren't obvious enough from the first page or so, there's a lot of very heavy-handed foreshadowing throughout.

It's weird. The author has plenty of 'geek cred', but all the name-dropping of scifi reads more like a non-fan trying to pretend--a bunch of famous scifi titles mentioned essentially without context or import, as though just by saying the name you invoke some geeky power. Real geeks tend to have reasons why we like the things we like, and we're generally willing (too willing!) to discuss them at length, but in the story there's not much of that shown. Montgomery shows up in a location to be taught, some scifi words are spoken, and then it fades to black and any actual explanation about the scifi stuff--or interaction between the characters--mostly occurs 'off-screen'.

On the one hand, I guess it's assumed that we, the readers, will already have a fairly good idea of why we like what we like, and will already be familiar with the titles mentioned. And, sure, that's true enough for me. On the other hand, would you get anything out of it if you're not already in the know? And, correspondingly, do you get anything out of the name-dropping if you are already in the know?

In summary: the story is basically okay, but nothing special, and there's nothing to particularly appeal to geeks, unless it's some fantasy about the cheerleader falling for a geek. Which, honestly, it's been done. We don't need another.