by Ashley and Taylor (link)
Genre het, drama, romance
Pairings Taylor/OFC, Zac/OFC
Length 39 chapters
Status Unfinished
Although Shake It, Take Control starts with a pretty basic, boring premise–a girl being forced to move to Tulsa for plot reasons–it does manage to do a few interesting things to distinguish itself. Some of these things are a bit cliche, but combined together it all still somehow works.
For personal reasons, I don’t tend to be a big fan of cancer stories, but Ashley and Taylor write this one so well that I can’t help wondering if one of them has personal experience with it. If this fic hadn’t been written years before The Fault In Our Stars, I would assume that story inspired the authors. Kealy is a bit of a Mary Sue, and that isn’t helped by my assumption that she must be based on one of the authors. Her personality can be a bit grating, with all her quirks, but the narration improves as the story goes on.
Or perhaps it’s just helped by the added narrators. Normally, I’m not a fan of that (and I really dislike the few slips into third person), but Zac is the sort of character who might have remained a frustrating enigma forever if he hadn’t been allowed to narrate a bit. His sexual tension with Kealy is what drives the plot, and is really the best thing about Shake It, Take Control. The authors throw in just a few too many plot twists near the end for me, and that’s a shame, because I had really come to enjoy this unfinished fic in spite of my problems with it.
Review by Bethany (website)