My family became hooked on Harry Potter in 2001, when my son was going through a stage of reluctance to read fiction. Now it is a family hobby.
I am English and my home is in Birmingham. I am a psychology teacher; my husband, who is Australian, is a computer programmer and network engineer. We have three children and we are Evangelical Christians.
This is a great beginning! You have hit off Lily's voice really well. I imagine her to be a girl with a mature vocabulary, and you evoked the atmosphere of Hogwarts vividly (parchment, charmed flowers, bludger... we never forget this is the magical world). My only criticism is that Lily occasionally sounds American ... if this story is going to last until the end of the academic year (July) don't fall into the cardinal American trap of forgetting that Britain has Easter holidays! I am now really intrigued as to how a law-abiding student like Lily could have started a food-fight, and I'm off to follow the plot into the next chapter!
Author's Response: Thanks so much! I\'m glad for your opinion. it\'s nice to know what other people who are a lot better think. And yeah, I really don\'t know anything about the british-isms. But I\'ll ask my beta on that.Thanks again
This chapter is as good as the first. Lily really sounds like Lily. If she can't guess who sent her the flower, she really is thick ... but James and Sirius really can be insensitive, so they don't deserve to be thanked. I laughed when she Vanished James's parchment. And I still want to know why they were having a food fight!
Author's Response: You\'ll find out. yeah, I\'m glad I managed to make them come across bad, I thought I wousdn\'t be able to. And really, if I were Lily, I think I wouldn\'t know who\'d sent me the flower either.
You had me laughing! Nice take on a minor canon incident. The action was well-paced and your command of language was smooth.
Awww, sad. Some sibling jealousy is only to be expected, especially as Jane was unlucky enough to have TWO wizard brothers and be the only one left out. But the odds are 1 in 4 - so the Creeveys only had a 1 in 16 chance that BOTH of Colin's younger siblings would have been magical. Jane had a lot to put up with in her adolescence.
There were uncomfortable parallels to real life here. It's so hard for children who believe their siblings are more talented, or beautiful or simply more loved. You've used magic as a metaphor for a hornets' nestful of triggers.
I'm rather glad that you let Colin survive. Somehow I always expected Dennis to be the one to die - after all, Colin was only a few weeks below the cut-off age, while Dennis was two years younger. I think it's highly likely that Jane would marry a wizard because of course she'd meet all her brothers' friends. Producing a Squib child, though? Only likely if her husband was from an old, inbred purebood family that carried the bad gene, in which case their chances were even. So I suppose that's the sort of wizard he was.
Thanks for making us stop and think.
Author's Response: Thanks for the review!!! Yes, I think what Jane suffers is common enough amongst us Muggles, only using magic sort of exacerbates what happens and makes it more obvious, and I think it would be particularly hard being the younger sibling of the Creevey brothers because they're so excitable and enthusiastic that I think they'd find it hard to be sensitive to Jane at the same time. So that's actually the only reason Colin lived... when I started writing this fic, I'd forgotten that he died in DH.
Yes, I agree that it's more likely that Jane would marry a wizard, partially because she met all of her brothers' friends and also because she would struggle to talk about her brothers and everything she experienced because of them without revealing their secret.
As to the probability of Jane producing a Squib - I never bothered to figure out genetics or that kind of thing, I didn't think about that at all. I put it in rather to show that it's possible for Muggles and wizards to live in harmony, even in the same family. Which is a nice ending for Jane, as she really struggled with it in her own adolescence.
Anyway, thanks for the review :).
~Katrina
PS - And McGonagall WAS still at Hogwarts in 1999. But as she was by then the Headmistress, it makes sense that someone else would have replaced her as Transfiguration Teacher and Head of Gryffindor. I'm sure the students adored Bill Weasley!
Author's Response: Oh, was she? I couldn't find out (using HP lexicon) so I assume she retired after the battle. Oh well. I couldn't think of anyone else to become Head of Gryffindor, as JKR killed off half the Order, and they seemed the logical ones. Although I thought Bill wouldn't want to do it for more than a year because he wouldn't want to live away from his wife and family (as Victoire was born in May of 1992). Although even while at Hogwarts he must have seen Fleur at some point... because Victoire was born... anyway, thanks for pointing that out about McGonagall, I'll keep it in mind for future fics.
Yes, I definitely enjoyed this! It's a huge thing for a Muggle to adapt to living with magic, but I think someone as relaxed as Mandy would be easy to live with, and Rob will be fine.
As you say, he can't marry Hermione (what substance was there really to a primary school crush?) but of course he had to solve the mystery before he could recognise the reason for his fascination and move on. I think you conveyed his tense, flustered personality very well.
Lisa Turpin is in fact mentioned in the Sorting, but Kevin, Su and Stephen are in the classlist only. I noticed you swapped Stephen with Michael so there would be enough boys in Ravenclaw (I do that too).
And I hope Rob will live happily ever after because there are certainly some advantages for Muggles who marry wizards.
Author's Response: Thanks for another review :). Yes - obviously Rob and Hermione were never going to be a couple, and there was very little substance in his crush on her, it was more of a fascination because she suddenly disappeared, rather than any particular attraction to her.
Whoops, I missed that Lisa was also mentioned in the Sorting. I'm not quite sure what you mean that I swapped Stephen with Michael... in 'my' version, Terry Boot, Michael Corner, Anthony Goldstein, Kevin Entwhistle and Stephen Cornfoot are the Ravenclaw boys, whilst Lisa Turpin, Su Li, Mandy Brocklehurst, Padma Patil and Morag McDougal are the girls. I didn't mention Terry, Michael, Anthony or Padma in this fic as I thought they would have kept separate due to being in the DA - there must have been some sort of disagreement or something. And as for Morag... well I sort of forgot about her.
And yes I do believe that Rob will live happily ever after - there are certainly times when magic freaks him out, but gradually he learns to get used to it and to understand other witches and wizards. I think it was important that in this he got to know other magical people as people, and he didn't just label them as 'weirdos'. And yes, there certainly would be advantages for him!
~Katrina