by Jess (link)
Genre het, romance, drama
Pairings Taylor/Natalie, Taylor/OFC
Length prologue and 13 chapters
Status Unfinished
If there’s one thing I’m a sucker for, it’s a story that tackles that sticky period of Taylor’s life right before and right after his shotgun wedding. When I noticed that Sound of Light featured Natalie, I knew I had to check it out.
There is, actually, a lot more to this story than just another retelling of Taylor and Natalie’s relationship. It begins in New Orleans, where Taylor meets a girl named Etta who shares a certain habit–Taylor doesn’t quite consider it an addiction–with him. In spite of that, their relationship is up and down, with Etta referred to them as soulmates yet also telling him not to expect too much. Neither she nor the backdrop of New Orleans is fully realized, although Jess shows a good knowledge of all the cities the story visits.
Its next stop is, naturally, Atlanta, where we get a slightly fictionalized version of how Taylor and Natalie met. They too form an immediate connection that looks to be really interesting… if the story hadn’t been abandoned right after that. Jess has some good, if not terribly unique, ideas here that I would really like to see fleshed out with longer chapters and a complete story. As it is, Sound of Light doesn’t quite get far enough to be a memorable classic, but it definitely had the potential.
Review by Bethany (website)