"Comes out of Darkness Morn" - Lightning on the Wave

Title: Comes out of Darkness Morn
Author: Lightning on the Wave

About the Book: Pure Awesome, Fiction, Fanfiction, Adventure, Alternate Universe, Psychological (I don't know what else to call it)
My rating: 10/10.
Fandom: Harry Potter

The third in Lightning on the Waves' Sacrifices series. The first was, of course, Saving Connor.

As time goes by, the series changes in flavor. While "Saving Connor" is where the story properly begins, I think "Comes out of Darkness Morn" is the point which actually makes the Sacrifices series what it is: a grim, realistic, strong story. A story in which good characters fall for good reasons, in which delusion shows itself as a major reason for turning 'evil'.

In later parts Harry will demand that his allies think. It's here that we see why: mindless obedience, the tendency to hide one's problems, the tendency to objectify others turn into Big Issues naturally. Some authors would slam their opinions into us like anvils. Lightning on the Wave shows the underdog, shows the functioning of well-intended, badly misled individuals so that they can be understood. Dumbledore becomes a very tangible antagonist from within the school, Harry's brother Connor makes the wrong decisions for the right reasons.

Every character is justified. Voldemort doesn't have just a few plans, but many of them, spreading throughout the series, plans which aren't discovered or foiled as easily as all that. The threat is not just implied, it is very much present. And not only is it present, it's very relatable.

This is the turning point for Harry in this series, where he decides what his further actions, his further life, shall be like. And in the mean time, we have Dementors, Sirius, Peter Pettigrew, some more Voldemort, Albus playing the villain, Lily Potter being very, very scary, Child Services and any number of exciting things.

"No Mouth But Some Serpent's" - Lightning on the Wave

Title: No Mouth But Some Serpent's
Author: Lightning on the Wave
About the Book: Pure Awesome, Fiction, Fanfiction, Adventure, Alternate Universe, Psychological (I don't know what else to call it)
My rating: 10/10.
Fandom: Harry Potter

This is of course a continuation of "Saving Connor". It is an Alternate Universe of "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets". It retains some of the elements there, though deliciously twisted.

Unfortunately, to say too much about it would spoil the first part. Let me see if I can find some intrguing things that aren't spoilers.

For the first part, it contains one of my favorite characters in the series, Sylarana. She is... well, she would probably like anybody to say that she is the prettiest, most astonishing, most amazing snake in the entire world. Her desire to be admired probably surpasses Lochkart's own, although hers can be forgiven because she's not a blind idiot. If given a choice, she'd probably be a Mary Sue. She isn't, of course, because the world doesn't agree with her being quite that astonishing, but I've enjoyed many a bout of narcissism from her. And many of her threats to bite people.

"I require someone to care for me, to burnish my scales and tell me I am beautiful and feed me the choicest bits of their food. I like eggs. And milk. And the flesh of birds. And sweets. And—"

"I am not going to take care of you!" Harry hissed back at her, and for a moment, he thought he heard his voice the way she must be hearing it, full of intricate twists and turns and soft sibilants. It was certainly not speaking English.

He blocked the thought from his mind. He was not evil. He would not let himself be.

"Yes, you are," said the Locusta. "I've watched you. Your dearest possession is that lump of a boy who shares your nest. If you do not take care of me, I will bite him."

She becomes one of the closest creatures to Harry, so much so that she actually twines inside his mind. As far as familiars go, she's one of the best. I wonder if she lampshades Mary Sues.

This is also the book where, if you haven't realized that there's something very wrong with Harry, you do realize it now. His psychology is messed up beyond the point where if there was a nagging feeling before that somehow the author had messed up and exaggerated things, you realize that it's Harry who is messed up and has exaggerated psychology - for a very good reason, too, that looms darker and darker over the horizon.

And other people notice.

But it's also a book in which the main characters are still children. There are pranks involved, and Lockhart is at the butt of a very satisfying one concerning his most prized possession.

At the same time, one of the things I really appreciate in Lightning's writing is that threats are actually threats. In the canon series there are periods of time when problems seem far off, when studies are the biggest issues. When the attacks upon students happen, the threat seems controlled. Here?... You get the feeling, and for a good reason, that things are much more dangerous than in Rowling's "Chamber of Secrets".

Oh, and Dumbledore?... He gets to be much, much worse than Voldemort at times.

"Saving Connor" - Lightning on the Wave

Title: Saving Connor
Author: Lightning on the Wave
About the Book: Pure Awesome, Fiction, Fanfiction, Adventure, Alternate Universe, Psychological (I don't know what else to call it)
My rating: 10/10.
Fandom: Harry Potter

Lightning on the Wave deserves an amazing introduction - unfortunately, relatively little is known about her. I have heard that others pieced together that she was studying for her Ph.D. and teaching some university-level classes a few years back and I've seen her mentioning a Ph.D. somewhere. This is the curse of fanfiction authors: they are here, then they are gone. It's not a curse upon their heads, but upon the heads of their readers. You can never quite keep track and all you have is amazing stories to testify that they exist.

"Saving Connor" is the first part of a series of 7 AUs (each corresponding, like the canon, to a school year). James and Lily Potter are still alive. Harry has a twin brother, Connor, who is the Boy-Who-Lived. Harry has his lightning bolt-shaped scar from canon, but Connor has a heart-shaped scar that shows off his status. Sirius and Remus are quite well and Peter Pettigrew is in Azkaban. Coming to this story from canon, it looks like your basic dream-fulfilment story. Except Lightning has a way of twisting dreams into nightmares.

The characters are amazingly built. Connor is a carefree heroic type, not very bright and very blunt, living his childhood. Harry, a quiet, studious type, loves him to pieces and will protect him and give him a happy life at all costs - and you will come to hate this love along with many other characters before "Saving Connor" is done. Lily is sweetness personified, Albus is a shrewd leader, James is as shiny as a nice Gryffindor should be. With these patterns in mind, Lightning dances around expectations, revealing new facets underneath masks.

First line of the book: "What are your vows, Harry?"

I thought I saw where this was going from the beginning. I thought this was going to be an overly-long series about Harry Potter always being in the shadows and Connor taking the spotlight. I thought Harry and Lily had a conspiracy going to save the world and that it would go on forever.

I was wrong.

Harry knew what they were, even though he was only five. He whispered them as his mother held him over his brother's bed, and his mother said them with him, murmured hypnotic words that Harry had heard his whole life.

This first book in the series follows the plot of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" closely enough, but you still have hints of things that are entirely different. Holes that JK Rowling left open in the originals are now filled.

Why do pureblooded wizards despise wizards born out of normal families?... Because purebloods have their own, very rich culture, centering on magic and rituals and they believe that outsiders are threatening this. Why is Lucius Malfoy such a stuck-up? It's part of his Dark culture, complete with facade. As the story goes by it becomes clearer and clearer that the magical world has its very clear subtle lines, courtesies, practices which are visibile to those who are born into it, invisible to outsiders, who then look like fools.

There are also some very significant differences between the canon and "Saving Connor", new meanings added to events which start adding up to a feeling of wrongness which will eventually get explained (in the next part of the series), but which is not at all accidental. After all, mostly all the scenes are written from Harry Potter's third person POV, which means that somewhere... in there... there is a problem.

"The unicorn was a sacrifice. He'd been a sacrifice, in Lily's terms, even though he didn't think of himself that way; he was just making sure that Connor got to enjoy a chance in the sun that would otherwise be snatched away, and unfairly.

And he loved his brother enough to lie for him, and to burn a troll for him, and to let a unicorn die for him."

It's an engaging story, with an occasional snippet of humor that strikes gold. Again, the characters are very well-developed and Narcissa is one of my favorites in this series. The take on Dumbledore will (eventually) change your views on him forever and even Voldemort manages to be more purely evil than in the original. Another bonus point is that there is very little left to chance and victories happen with any amount of preparation and care taken in advance. Battles between strong wizards are indeed impressive, violent scenes are just as violent as they need to be, politics with its conflicting interests is very well described.

A ten out of ten for style, plot, ideas, background culture, characterizations and generally everything. Including being annoying in all the right places to show that people aren't always perfect or smart, but not annoying enough to make you stop reading.

You can find it here.

"Ivanhoe" - Sir Walter Scott

Title: Ivanhoe
Author: Sir Walter Scott
About the Book: Historical, adventuring, classic, Robin Hood, knights!
My rating: 9/10.

To clear matters up: this book is doubly historical. One: it's written in 1819, which is long enough ago to be part of history rather than part of the now. Two: it takes place in the 12th century.

A lot of people back in the day seemed to really love Scott and considered him some sort of god of writing, at least from what I gather. He's been credited with making people think of the Medieval Age in that warm, fuzzy feeling sort of way which we have now. He pretty much invented historical novels as we know them. That's something, y'know? I'm not one to say "critics consider this cool, therefore I must praise it", but I factor their opinion in.

So Ivanhoe. It's got knights running all over the scenery, doing what knights do best. Namely, fighting. And there's politics involved, doing what politics does best: complicate matters in cool ways. And there's a few ladies who do more than just sit pretty, which is always a plus in my book when it comes to Medieval Age damsels.

There's a lot of interesting characters there. The protagonist, Ivanhoe, is a nice, righteous sort of man, the exact type which you think of when you think of a knight. It's the classic sort of protagonist, but it works, since you can actually feel him, his struggles and his quest. His love interest, Lady Rowena, is a noble lady of Saxon origin (12th century, remember? It was right after the Norman conquest, when people weren't the English we know today) who is to be married for political interests to a guy who's about as thrilled about the entire thing as she is. In my book, that adds to the realism of the book: there's no clear sides here, rather many people acting according to their own varied beliefs. Rowena doesn't love the guy, the guy doesn't want to become a Saxon figurehead and Rowena's adoptive sort-of dad (Cedric, Ivanhoe's real dad) is what would be a nationalist, if nationalism existed back then.

Robin Hood also makes an appearance. While I wasn't particularly thrilled by him - I feel his character isn't quite as well-developed as it could've been - I loved Friar Tuck. His double role as clergyman and Robin's helper translates as almost a show of double personality. (wiki now tells me that later Robin Hoods borrowed much from Ivanhoe. I suppose the more complex adaptations that didn't exist at the time cast him in shadow now)

On the high politics level, King Richard and Prince John are nicely antithetical to each other: Richard is indeed courageous and worthy of his "Lion-Hearted" nickname, but also careless about his kingly duties; while Prince John is weak and power-hungry. Indeed, what they have in common seems to be a single trait: they can't rule England worth a damn.

Minor characters are also delightful, whether we're talking about the fool Wamba, whose foolishness remains to be debated, or the Jewish Issac who fits every stereotype of Jews ever, only to have that image of his ethnic group thoroughly deconstructed by his daughter, Rebecca, who is as great a lady as Rowena in her own right - and a very strong character.

The plot is nicely twisting and turning, the question being mostly not about the destination, which might be guessed from the premises, but about the road taken in getting there. The characters live and breathe and interact with each other wonderfully.

9/10 because the style isn't what today's readers are accustomed with, so it might not be easy to understand what Scott's saying at times.

Find it here for free.

"813" - Maurice Leblanc

Title: 813
Author: Maurice Leblanc
About the Book: Fiction, Comedy, Adventure, Thievery, Disguise, Mystery!
My rating: 9/10.

Arsene Lupin! Gods, I love this guy. A charming, intelligent, moral thief who has adventures and whatnot. A master of disguise, of trickery, of drama, of jokes - and since we all have weaknesses, one of mine is tricksters. When I saw "813" in a second hand bookshop, I whisked it away in my backpack and ran home with it (after paying for it, of course).

"813" didn't disappoint. I'm afraid I can't discuss the plot, since any discussion whatsoever would lead to spoilers. There's twists and turns at every step and you never know exactly where you land. To give you a flavor of things, Arsene Lupin is accused of murder, which is the one things he never does. So with the police at his back, he rushes forward to find the real criminals and discover the answer behind the mystery of a young man and an important note saying simply '813'.

There's international politics involved and a bit of a French 'take that!' against Sherlock Holmes. For some strange reason, while his name in the original French (and in my translated Romanian) is Herlock Sholmes, in English they translated it as Holmlock Shears. Translators. Go figure.

So it's a thrilling, light-hearted adventure, cheery, fast-paced, engaging. The only reason why I didn't give it a 10/10 is because the style is somewhat sketched and jolted and despite my fangirl enthusiasm about Lupin, it kept nagging at me during my reading. But that's a small fault.

You can find it for free here.