Ah It just came to me like a bolt from the blue.
A major part of school stories would be the boy meets girl and both have to figure out that they like each other, yadda, yadda.
So if belle wants to re write this into a high school romance epic.......
Please don't ban stick me

Oh yeah, update, meeting with dumbles

 

Updated, slow paced chapter that perks up right at the end. With Cliffie!

 

updated again. A filler chapter to some extent, no action but the plot moves along.
They are back to school now.
All in all a nice chapter, but i must admit the slow pace is getting to me. I hope he moves the story along at a faster pace in year 7, if he needs the same amount of chapters before it comes to a climax i'll stop reading.

 

I couldn't finish this chapter because the author's bad dialog mechanics were pissing me off so much. He puts his paragraph breaks when a new character speaks, rather than when the focus of the narrative shifts to a new character.

Char A speaks. Char B reacts. <pbreak>
Char B speaks. Char C reacts. <pbreak>
Char C speaks. Char A reacts.

and on and on and on. It ruins the flow of the dialog scenes. It makes it hard to keep track of who's speaking so you have to look back at the previous paragraph to see who reacted last. It's just plain annoying.

 

THIS IS THE CHAPTER, we have been waiting for, Drama, Action and A twist.

 

Great! Now if someone could just reaccount the last 10 chapters or so I've missed due to completely losing interest in plowing through the filler any further, it'd be even better!

 

I just outright skip over everything that happens at Harry's school in America. I'm only interested in the goings on pertaining to the war in Britain.

 

/me is doing the same.

The chapters are long enough for that. But the scene at Hogwarts was a bit too perfect. Throwing AK's should cause some deaths. Since the battle in the Ministry the author seems to be afraid of finishing off "good" characters. Even the US-werewolf-affair was a relatively clean thing.

The ending of the chapter was ok.

 

I tried to get back to this latest chapter (like IP, I had stopped reading a while back), but closed the window when I saw Voldemort described as "the bad man" twice in the same paragraph. I half-expected someone to accuse him of having WMDs next... Plus the whole Dumbledore thing is starting to annoy me. Ok, so D. is manipulative and whatnot. But it seems now that he can't even breathe without Harry being annoyed and promising he'll kill him. Please...Argh! I'm late for work

 

Yeah, big bad Harry was one of my biggest peeves with this fic; It seemed everyone were bowing backwards to the little whelp. Some kid sucker-punches him during Quidditch, and everyone are suddenly quaking in their shoes, with teachers begging him not to kill the boy in retaliation etc... Then there are Harry's constant ego trips, with him bragging left and right how they better not leave him in the same room with Dumbledore and shit like that.

I mean, who the hell does this kid thing he is? Al Capone? And the worst thing is, everyone's going along with it and no one sees anything strange that he's allowed to threaten people left and right, prank with permission, have a back door into the school, his own private elf, jinxes on his dorm and throw temper tantrums whenever he pleases, without repercussions.

 

new chap out, its not to shabby if i say so myself.

yeah I can't stand reading Harry at the American school, but all the war-related parts are great in my opinion.

 

And the next one - about 2/3 of it are quite boring, but again the war related stuff is ok - but at the moment Harry has nothing to do with it. That part mainly focusses on Rufus Scrimgeour and Voldemort. An interesting bit is a dialogue between Scrimgeour and Tony Blair, and the outcome: How to gain information about an unplottable location.

There is the usual American-School-stuff and the Harry/Sophie scenes (H trying to buy a restaurant ...), which I don't really read anymore. And this chapter there is this Ginny-thingy. Ginny is only a very minor character, but nevertheless annoying. Dean cheats on her, and, one might be tempted to say of course, she is probably going to be paired up with an American.

Lately I think his style is going downhill. He always had the annoying habit to try to inform the reader about every last bit, just not to leave any question. Now more and more often he directly addresses the reader i. e. to insert boring jokes about the secksual ongoing between H&S

 

It is hard to say if this is average or above average chapter. A good bit of
action, but in some ways this chapter shows the importance of good editing. Some parts should have been cut, while others could have been expanded. Belle chose not to write dramatic actions scenes where he could have.

Ah well, there is always next chapter.

 

And the next chapter is up. The best thing about this chapter is that it covered about two months of time.

 

He just updated again. I've got to say, the "bad man" thing IS getting a bit annoying. Also, some of the 'newscaster' style commentary is probably unnecessary. That having been said it's a pretty amusing rip on Dumbledore, and his Rufus Scrimgeour is quite the pragmatist. I'd probably give it 3/5 at this point.

 

That's the main point which annoys me nowadays. Over the years and two long fics he has developed his own style but the quality dropped. The text isn't as fluent as before.

But there are also some other elements. His interpretation of the whole OBHWF meanwhile melted together with his American school gang is too perfect, and scenes like the following are just ridiculus.

 

I thought this was one of the better non-action chapters. But it was filled with all these mini-drama's so that could have helped. I bleeped over the last few paragraphs, so this review is flawed.

 

It got updated again. The commentary seems a bit flat this time around, and I think it's a question of "show, don't tell", and he's doing a bit too much telling.

Also, some of the dialog doesn't sound right when the British people are talking as it's hard to imagine a British accent around the words, and a final note - Dobby and Winky speak way too intelligently even if you allow for some inevitable vagaries in the way people write house-elf grammar.

Still a 3/5 IMO.

 

Flat is a good word so is dull, but this chapter perked up at the end with a cliffie.