MEERA AND THE GLITCH A chapter book for readers aged 9-12 Approximately 10,000 words across eleven chapters Author: Dr Raj Balu, Consultant Paediatrician
Nine-year-old Meera is building a model lighthouse on her bedroom floor. The shiny red brick has been saved, since the very beginning, for the top. As she stretches up to place it, something happens - and the next thing she knows, the bricks are scattered across the carpet and the lighthouse is unfinished. She has met Glitch.
The story is told as an extended address from Meera to her best friend Lila, looking back on the year in which Glitch came and Meera began to learn his shape. Glitch is the name Meera gives to her seizures: a guest who arrives without knocking, who turns her arms into cooked spaghetti, who makes the world go quiet at the worst possible moments. He has personality - smug, unpredictable, fond of his own pranks - and his cruellest trait is his maybe: the not-knowing of when he will come.
The first public crisis is the school sports day. Meera, the anchor of the relay, is certain she will win. Glitch arrives mid-race; she falls in front of the whole school. Her classmates do not know what they are seeing. Her teacher Mrs Patel kneels beside her. Lila stays - does not turn away, does not run for help - and that staying is the moment Meera will remember for the rest of the book.
In the middle chapters, Meera and her parents enter what she calls hot-red and cold-blue: the heat of fear and the chill of waiting in rooms with old magazines while nobody yet says the word for what is happening. Then Meera meets Dr Robin, who shows her the wobbly drawing of her own electricity on a screen and tells her, gently, that he has seen this kind of thing before, in other children. Even messy electricity, he says, follows patterns.
Meera and her parents draft a three-line plan - Stay calm. Keep me safe. Stay with me. She tells Lila, who recites it back. She invents a Bedtime Fortress with walls and a drawbridge of her own imagining. When Glitch tries to push back, Meera and Lila have already practised. When he arrives at a supermarket, her mother knows what to do. The plan holds.
In the final movement, Meera takes the harder step of naming Glitch in front of her class. Sitting on the carpet, she tells them what happens to her - that he is not magic and he is not her - and that the most helpful thing they can do is stay calm. The class listens. She runs the relay again, this time finishing, with Lila watching.
In the closing chapter, an older Meera tells Lila what she now knows. Glitch may not leave; the book does not promise he will. But he no longer decides everything. The plan is durable. The team is in place. And the lighthouse - broken and waiting on the carpet for so much of the book - is finished. The shiny red brick is on top. Her hands did not shake.
Meera and the Glitch is a chapter book for children aged 9-12 living with epilepsy, and for the people around them. The manuscript is followed by an Author's Note, a Note for Parents and Carers, and a Teacher's Guide with classroom strategies and discussion questions, with international epilepsy resources signposted for the major English-reading markets. The author, Dr Raj Balu (MBBS, MRCPCH), is a Consultant Paediatrician with clinical experience in the UK and India.
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