Harry-as-a-girl AUs can be interesting, but I'd really like to see something original and different. So far, this is just the same story we're familiar with, except Harry is "Alyssa" (and Snape is "good looking, tall, and muscular"? Oy.) How does "Alyssa" change the dynamic of the Trio? Is it Hermione who is her best friend now? Does Ron have romantic feelings for her?

The scene with Draco seemed pointless, especially since he treats her exactly the same way he treated Harry. On the one hand, I'm glad that you didn't immediately have Draco crushing on Alyssa, just because she's a girl (or worse, her crushing on Draco), but on the other hand, it just reinforced the impression that the only difference between this and the original story is that Harry is a girl (with an improbable name) and Snape has been made good looking.

Starting right in the middle of OotP makes it hard for us to see how your character diverges from the canonical Boy-Who-Lived, so I would recommend that future chapters perhaps cover a bit more of her past, and how she might view the world differently than Harry did.

I'm intrigued. So far Draco and Narcissa seem quite in character. Felicity is a little too precious, especially for nine, and it's not really a Malfoy-esque name, but I'm still curious to see who her mother is and where you are going with this.

Felicity's insight and empathy for the peacocks is what grabbed me. A nice little bit of characterization right at the start that made me want to keep reading and find out more about this girl.

I think it takes away from Narcissa's coldness a bit to have her call Felicity "Fee" -- I'm not sure if that was deliberate or not.

Overall, well written. I spotted one error: "They don’t like being petting anywhere else" should be "petted."

Cute -- I can see Hermione starting to lose it when being a mother doesn't go according to the textbooks.

Ron really needs a good kick, and Harry, too. Their wives are being run ragged doing all the childcare while they sit there playing chess? Are they still twelve-year-old boys?

Astoria's introduction confused me a bit at first --  "a pretty girl with blonde, curly hair and delicate features" made me think she was much younger, until she was described as being pregnant. A pregnant, married woman isn't a girl.

Teddy's characterization was good. He seems an ordinary young man, perhaps a little like Harry would have been with a less hazardous and unhappy childhood, which is essentially how Rowling described Teddy. Victoire also avoided most of the cliches I usually read, though we don't really see much of her.

I thought it was a nice story overall, though I'm not sure I buy Andromeda Tonks being strong enough to survive the death of most of her family in the war, but only "clinging to life" until Teddy turns seventeen. I think there should have been something stronger or more compelling to precipitate her demise; she's just not old enough to give up and die because she thinks Teddy doesn't need her anymore.

The writing was good, though there was some repetitive word usage and a bit of superfluous description. Also, there seems to be some pronoun confusion here: " Wondering if he was about to find out the crime he had committed to make him feel so awful, she stopped."

I may check out A Proper Goodbye. I think this woud be interesting as part of a larger Teddy Lupin story.

This is an interesting story premise. I have to offer some critique, though.

 1. As another reviewer pointed out, your writing style is very verbose, and the dialog is stilted. Nothing that comes out of the characters' mouths sounds like the way real people talk -- it reads more like they are delivering lines in a theatrical production. (And no, I do not believe that you actually talk that way. Having a large vocabulary isn't the same thing.)

2. For the most part, your writing is pretty good, but I caught a number of grammatical errors, particularly with verb tense.

3. Along with the wordiness, way too much overuse of adjectives and adverbs and similes. A little bit makes writing sparkle; a lot makes it sound like someone trying to show off their vocabulary.

4. There is a lot of unnecessary information that gets inserted in places that interrupt the flow of the story. You've put James in Azkaban, which is a very tense and dramatic situation, and the readers want to know what's going to happen next. So you go off on a tangent about Hugo's girlfriend's platinum-blond hair, followed by reminiscing about how James met Augusta. Now we've totally become disconnected from the tension you built up by putting James in prison. Frankly, finding out that he met Augusta in a fairly typical Hollywood-style jerk-meets-girl, girl-decks-jerk, jerk-eventually-wins-girl-with-his-roguish-charm manner could be condensed to a paragraph or two.

 (Stephen King does this a lot --in the middle of a story, he'll suddenly spend 50 pages on a flashback one of the characters has to a childhood memory. That's one reason why most people say that Stephen King needs a stronger editor. It's a bad habit to get into, especially if you're not Stephen King.)

Don't take my criticisms as saying "Your story sucks." I actually find it pretty interesting and will probably keep writing. But I do think you could use some stylistic, narrative, and SPaG help from a beta.

That's pretty scary, that the best Muggle literature Hogwarts can offer is Ayn Rand! Scorpius does seem like just the sort of angsty little git who'd think Rand was awesome. Sure hope he grows out of it -- Terry Goodkind's Objectivist wizards are bad enough!

Oddly, I hadn't gotten any notices of subsequent chapters for this story -- something must be wrong with MNFF's story alerts again.