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o5: Atonic by RepulsiveAllure

Title: Atonic

Author: RepulsiveAllure

Description: Protect your head . . . and your heart.

Genres: romance; short story

Tags: anna; neck; now; phone; pink; poetryish; recollection; regret; roof; sister; sorry; static; twitch; tyler; voice; wings; words

Status: complete

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As Lexie explains in the author's note that follows the story, atonic is a form of epilepsy that causes brief seizures that cause complete limpness for a few seconds: just long enough to fall, and get hurt. She weaves this into a love story perfectly. Anna, who has atonic epilepsy, knows from the twitch in her neck that she will fall but she is powerless to stop it. Until she has someone who is there to catch her.

Don't be fooled by the light cover and the adorable romance. Atonic is a deceptive book: from the then/now format, it's clear from the start that there's an event, and while it soon becomes evident what that event is, it doesn't detract from the beauty of this story. Written in 30 parts that make up 8 pages, it is a quick and easy read that still manages to pack a punch. The romance between Anna(belle) and Ty(ler) is, like the story in its entirety, bittersweet.

Ty is there to save Anna. He catches her when she falls, and he jokes about it too ("It's a good thing you didn't order the soup", he muses when Anna faceplants her salad as the result of a neck-twitching atonic seizure). His humour and their relationship brings a light touch to what is, essentially a dark story. The end brings it full circle perfectly, and the fact that I devoured it without even pausing to comment or vote until I was done was enough of a marker to me that the book is well worthy of a place here.

Lexie has such an enviably precise style of writing: every word seems necessary, and as a result the story is concise and powerful. It is a quality shared across all of the works by her that I have read, and all the ones I have dipped into and cannot wait to complete. Her writing is the kind that one hungrily consumes, sitting down with a stack of stories and not moving until each one has been read.

Head on over to Lexie's profile and be bowled over by her talent, and be sure to check out the rest of her works!