Title: face death in the hope (original title not capitalized)
Author: LullabyKnell
Rating: Teen & up
Genre: Drama/Time travel fix-it
Status: WIP
Library Category: Probably Alternates
Pairings: Harry/Regulus, James/Lily
Length: About 157k words so far
Summary:

Harry looks vaguely nervous, scratching the back of his neck. “It's a really long story,” he says finally, almost apologetically, “and it's really hard to believe.”

“Try me,” Regulus says, more than a little daringly.

Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5986366/chapters/13756558

So this is a new favorite of the "Harry goes back to MWPP time" stories.

It opens with Regulus in the process of dying in the cave. Harry appears seemingly out of nowhere and rescues him. From there on they try to get their bearings and plot a tentative course of action to bring down Voldemort.

The good:

Characterisation is a marvel. The character voices are believable and feel organic. Apart from Regulus, named OCs like Marlene McKinnon and Dorcas Meadowes are also fully fleshed out, with interesting, distintctive personalities. Lily, James and Sirius are expanded upon with great care.

Character interactions are very well written. There is a good balance of screen time and importance. The dialogue and narration do a good job of establishing the existing character relationships and building up new ones.

The worldbuilding is very competent. The prose establishes a both whimsical and grave tone for the story. It is very evocative of how the characters live and move in a wonderful world, but on that is on the brink of catastrophe.

You know how in many time travel stories the protagonist keeps himself "hidden" in order to preserve the timeline or some such bullshit? Well nothing like that happens here. Harry moves quickly to prove who he is to others and to secure clear objectives in order to facilitate Voldemort's defeat.

Harry is not exactly in top shape, mentally. The story does something innovative in providing an excellent reason as to why he walked to his death in book 7. I'd go as far as to say that the slow unveiling of that reason is my favorite part of the story.

The bad:

The pacing sucks. There's no getting around it. In 157k words barely four or five days pass. Admittedly they are very full days, but... it doesn't bode well for the future of the story. The Harry/Regulus pairing hasn't even begun, for example.

The prose can be purplish at times. The author sometimes gets overboard with dramatizing certain scenes and character reactions.

There is a degree of repetition. Some information which the author considers important is brought up again and again.

Conclusion:

If you like reading about Harry meeting his parents (I do), but also hate most such stories (I absolutely do), you'll probably like this.

I'll give this a clinical 3/5 which I'll subjectively raise to 4/5, because I enjoyed it so much. Again, however, the pacing is a real issue. Projecting this story to an ending, I estimate, would take at least 400 thousand words. Which, let's face it, probably means it's going to be abandoned.

 

I read up to chapter 5 and it seems really good. The interactions between Harry and Regulus are gold.
--- Post automerged ---
Update: I read the whole fic, and there are no glaring problems to me. I haven't enjoyed a harry potter fic more in a long time. It has great characterization and Marlene McKinnon is characterized masterfully. The interactions between Regulus and Sirius are also spot on, and the way Harry suffers from his memories seems very believable while not being too angsty. Reading other comments on this thread a common complaint is pacing, but personally I don't think pacing being slow is necessarily bad when it doesn't get in the way of the plot. In this story, unfortunately, pacing does impact the plot, because the author advances the story really slowly and it gets in the way of all the interesting events the author has undoubtedly planned out.
TLDR: I enjoyed it a lot so I give it a 4.5, however due to the pacing I rounded it down to a 4.

 

What's up with this weird thing the author kept doing with words and dashes. It completely kills the flow for me and is actually irritating to read. Example: "He has served-allowed-admired a man who will ruin them all."

Or: "Because under the handsome-face-charismatic-lies"

Or: "How will they remake-return-to-glory the world when everyone is dead-sick-gone?"

It annoyed me enough to drop the story before I even finished the first chapter.

 

My assumption there is that they copy-pasted from a forum or something where -word- was the code for word and wherever you were reading it didn't parse it the same way.

 

I read it on Ao3, the only place it was posted. That doesn't quite make sense anyway. Those words being strikethroughed would be even more worse.

 

This fic has updated again in the past week, so hopefully it's still alright to review it.

I really like it despite the big glaring flaw of its pacing (which, going by the author's notes, is done like this on purpose). It's got great characterisation as well as characterisation that aligns with canon and when applicable happens to align with my personal idea of what these people are like. It's very much character-driven; however, I also like what we have of the plot so far. There's several mysteries buried in the story (the memory thing and the sleeping curse and the deaths at St Mungo's) and it seems as though the author has a solid plan at least for the memory/pensieve issue Harry is suffering from.

Harry feels a lot like his canon self, although the slow pace isn't a completely natural fit with his personality. I've noticed that some of the Regulus-centric fics out there are also very slow-paced and I think he is much better suited for the introspective, thought-monologuey ways of this fic than Harry. Because of how slow the fic gets when it's just Harry or Regulus or the two of them together, I vastly prefer it when there are other characters present. The speed picks up and there's a lot of comic relief and interesting magic and mild relationship drama when any of the other cast are present.

Concerning the ohters, I think Marlene, Caradoc and James and Lily are particularly well done. Dorcas I'd like to see more of and Sirius I don't feel I have a proper grasp of yet in this fic, despite how much time he's gotten in the last few chapters. He feels protective of Regulus and that's all there is to him. Marlene, on the other hand, is such a good character that I could very easily see her as a JKR creation, she fits and adds perfectly to this world.

I really like what this fic does with divination and with cursed objects. It's not overbearing on the story, but it gives great insight into magical life; how these things are normal, everyday things for all the characters (except Harry). It's just enough world-building to be in keeping with canon but still add something new.

Language-wise, I haven't noticed many issues at all. It's easy to read and the dialogue is excellent when there are more characters than just Harry and Regulus involved. There's an overuse of ellipsis, which annoys me whenever the pace slows down, but that's about it.

It ticks most boxes for me and therefore I'd give it a 4/5.