Title: Child of Grace
Author: Lady Azar de Tameran
Rating: T
Genre: Drama/Mystery
DLP Category: Alternate
Pairing: Fem!Harry/Blaise
Status: WIP
Summary: AU. The Girl-Who-Lived discovers the wizarding world and unearths secrets that could change her life forever. Or end it. Fifth Year.
Link: Child of Grace (FFN)

Just started 5th year plot. One of the better fem!harry stories I've read so far. Get past the whole notEvil!Slytherin stuff in the first year and it starts to pick up nicely.

 

It was...boring. I got halfway through chapter 4 before homework started becoming more interesting, which is my indication of time to skip out. My main issue was that it was a very lot of repeating of the old stuff. In fact, for the first two chapters I had trouble distinguishing Holly from JK's Harry, the scenes were so similar. There were a few cosmetic changes, but I didn't feel that made a noticable impact on the story.

The writing quality is fine, no major mistakes that I spotted.

I couldn't get past the notEvil!Slytherin. I generally don't mind if slytherins are not all evil, but the introduction given to the students reminded me an aweful lot of the The Best Revenge's Hufflepuff introduction. Slytherin house is about cunning and ambition. Having all of your study problems be averted by being asked to go straight to prefects when in trouble seems completely out of character with that charter of the house. Upon comparison, the slytherins were even more welcoming and friendly than the hufflepuffs of the aformentioned story.

2/5
Good Writing, A few interesting quirks, but too closely adhered to the story, and a Slytherin house that I cannot understand.

 

If you can't get through chapter 4 then you wouldn't read Renegade Cause, either =P

Your points are valid (I mentioned a few), but I don't feel it deserves a 2/5. It's not exactly a canon-rehash after book 1 (even some events there play out differently).

 

Wrong on both counts, bob.

 

The first few chapters of Renegade Cause were nowhere near the same quality as what came after... and what?

 

Uh, just because a completely unrelated fic got better as it went along doesn't mean this one will.

Because it won't. This isn't very good.

 

Also, better != good. A fic can improve without ever being bad.

 

So you've both read the whole thing? I'm pretty sure I wasn't high while reading...

 

The story is boring enough that I really don't care enough to read it to when it gets better. If it even does, that is.

 

We seem to be going in circles...

 

It's not circles- you're trying to defend it instead of allowing the story to stand on its merits and flaws.

You've posted a story that you feel deserves the board's attention. Anything said after that is primarily directed at evaluating the story, without any direct criticism of you for posting it unless it was nowhere near worthy and thus a waste of time. It'd be different if you were reccing your own story (which is discouraged), but really you should just step back and let it stand or fall on its own.

As to the story: this is one of the best-written girl-substitution stories out there, with a lot of legs and consistent characterization. It does stumble into apologist territory, trying to redeem every character as a decent if misunderstood sort, aside from Voldemort himself and a few of his more rabid followers. Despite these re-interpretations, the storyline doesn't veer more than a few inches from canon, making the effort somewhat dull if you don't find her characterizations intriguing.

That this won't make it to the library isn't surprising to me, as it's a Girl!Harry without the progesterone added somewhere else to appeal to Dark Lord tastes. I would say it fits in Almost Recommended, but now that's it up For Review it'll probably scrape into the Recycle Bin.

tl;dr - 3 of 5. Good writing, but the revised plot doesn't take enough risks to impress.

 

Basically what vlad said. And comparing this fic to mine simply because the first few chapters aren't stellar (and I'm honest enough with myself to realize that the first few chapters of Renegade Cause aren't fantastic - it's why I've rewritten them twice and will probably rewrite them once more before the end) is poor argumentation and inaccurate to boot.

No, the problem with this fic is not that it has a hook that will anger people and make them slam the story before immediately clicking the red X out of what might seem to be an unreadable departure from canon, but that it has NO hook whatsoever. Honestly, the writing was pedantic and extremely dull, and it felt like just another canon retread with swapped genders and a Mary-Sue victim character.

There was literally nothing that kept me engaged, and considering the dialogue was neither riveting or interesting and the fic was flooded with angsty prose, I couldn't stand the damn thing. Coupled with the idiotic discovery of Lupin (something that felt like it was yanked straight from the Dangerverse), and a substance-less and passive main character... yeah, this fic doesn't belong here. It's not inherently offensive (well, actually, with some of the stupid coincidences and character 'powers', it kind of is, at least to my sensibilities), but it's not good either.

Still, a point needs to be made. This doesn't belong in the Library, and in my opinion, it doesn't belong in the Recycling Bin either. Not rating, but if I was, it would be 2/5 or less.

 

I've tried reading this story many times simply because I'm a fan of girl!Harry fics. And you know what? Every time I failed. I could never get further than the 3rd book. And even getting that far you have to read through a lot of shit, and at times, skim through whole parts instead of reading.

I wanted to like this, I really did. It's one of the only girl!Harry stories that isn't auto HP/Draco/Snape ship (which no matter how much I like girl!Harry, I will probably not read), and as much as it is lacking, it's better than 95% of this particular genre. But it's still not good enough, unfortunately.

3/5. Recycling bin worthy.

 

It's not very good, unfortunately. Fem!Harry is one of my guilty pleasures too, and I've read some pretty bad ones, but this one has nothing to recommend it. I got to the end of second year before I couldn't take any more of it.

Let's see if I can list the most glaring errors:

1. Pointless premise. If you're going to make Harry a girl, do something with it. Don't just write a fem!Harry that might as well be male. We've got a change in attitude towards studying (though, despite receiveing consistently high marks, she never uses any magic we didn't see Harry use in canon), and that's about it. Study habits aside, she seems to have exactly the same beliefs and capabilities as canon!Harry. Those abilities she does possess that Harry didn't don't impact the plot (see problem #4).

2. Super!Friends. Seriously. It was getting stupid by the end. Everyone has to be brilliant and hard working and caring towards others and tactful and loyal and possessing rare and wonderful talents. Bleurg.

3. Nice!Everyone. This also got stupid. Fine, yes, Slytherin doesn't have a copyright on evil. But it has a large stake in it. I'm not sure if there are any bad guys left. Everyone else has been turned into a misunderstood/blackmailed good guy. Even Voldemort (diary Riddle) has become a good guy. We repeatedly hear about how "The Ministry" is so evil and rejects "The Old Ways" (vomit) and then repeatedly see the families of the most powerful people in Britain - the people who determine Ministry policy - bemoaning this. The same is true of blood discrimination. We're told that it exists, but are repeatedly shown that the prominent pureblood families don't believe in it. Which people, then, if not the Purebloods, are the people perpetuating these beliefs?

4. Plot devices with the subtlely of a hammer. We're bludgeoned over the head so many times with random coincidences and magical happenings to make things go the authors way. Those tingling feelings Holly gets when she touches people, the way she's "just drawn to" some people, the way knowledge is dropped into the laps of her group that will be oh so handy for the plot. I laughed out loud when I read Blaise say casually,

How very convenient. Other conveniences: Luna happens to be a mindmage too, despite us being told how rare they are. Holly seems to always lose/forget her abilities when they would actually be of use (i.e. when they should upset the author's desired outcome, the author just ignores them). Stuff like the mind magic just seems to be there to make Holly seem more cool. She doesn't do anything with it.


There are lots of other problems (far too much tell and not enough show, exaggerated!abuse, Gryffindor bashing, lack of character progression) but those 4 are, I think, the core issues.

At first I was frustrated at how closely it kept to canon. Then, in 2nd year, it started deviating, and the changes were so bad that I found myself wishing for the canon rehash again.

Not worth even the recycling bin, I think. 2/5

Edit:

Actually, it isn't. Somewhere along the lines newfags started claiming this and it's been somewhat perpetuated, but it's never been said by any "prominent member", and certainly never by a mod/admin, that you should avoid recommending your own story.

 

Only the users who can't write and spare their self-esteem after getting savaged by saying it's a foible of the forum claim that.

 

I should have said that I don't recommend recc'ing your own fics. My reasoning isn't that it's treated more harshly, only that it tends to be a newb mistake- most of the self-recs I've seen were for stories that didn't make the cut, and someone familiar with the standard level of criticism here would probably recognize how far off their stuff really was. I can't be arsed to check numbers, but I would guess that 90% of self-recs that came from posters with less than 100 posts before they recc'd, shouldn't have bothered. (Again- not because they're unknown to the board, but because they're unfamiliar with the board.)

 

This is pretty much the definitive guilty pleasure fic.