Menu

Saturday, March 4, 2017

Inverarity - Alexandra Quick

Review.

There is a lot of bad Fan Fiction out there. Alexandra Quick, though, isn't one of those. It is, in fact, very, very good.

Did I mention the Alexandra Quick stories are very good?


Re-read (re-listen)


I'm doing a re-read listen of Harry Potter in German (using an audio book) to freshen up my German. This triggered me to re-visit Inverarity's live journal and see if the new book was done yet... unfortunately not. Still...


Update


Homo-erotic this is NOT!

Fan Fiction typically is written by fans, for fans. And sometimes it is awfully bad. I tried to read a few fanfics, and sometimes had to laugh, sometimes had to cry, and now and again had to throw up. Apparently, many fans seem to have a slightly homo-erotic fetish for Harry Potter smooching with his arch enemy Draco Malfoy. Or Dumbledore and Hagrid (ouch).

Gross. Well, personal taste and inner dark demons and 'better them than me'... (I don't care about same gender stuff, but Harry?!? )

Still, tired of reading one bad fanfic after another, I was about to give up on the whole thing when I stumbled over a reference to the Alexandra Quick stories. One more try then...

These are set in the Harry Potter universe, but on the other side of the big pond, in the USA. The author, Inverarity, takes the all-British world of wizardry of J K Rowling and makes it very, very 'American' (if there ever is such a thing).


Alexandra Quick

Alexandra is the daughter of a sought after rebel / terrorist. She visits the US equivalent of Hogwarts, and year after year gets herself deeper into trouble. Indeed the books follow the same pattern (naive newbie wizard with growing pains) as the Harry Potter books, but, well, different.

And just like when I read the Harry Potter books, I found myself yelling and screaming at the main character (Alexandra), who tends to make the worst decisions possible, just like Harry.

But there is one difference: I never thought of Harry as 'tough', 'heroic'. Even in the later books, I still think Harry's a moody, self doubting and somewhat egoistic teenager. Who could use a little more spine. Perhaps / probably that was J K Rowling's intention, who knows.

Alexandra is just as egoistic, moody, but... she has spine. Spit. Guts. Balls. (Okay, she's a girl, and still has more balls than Harry.)

I think Inverarity's take on the US world of wizards is better than Rowling's, and Alexandra is the better character. Sorry. (I'm neither living in the UK nor the US, so I reserve the right to make that call 😏)

I just hope the author Inverarity is going to continue and give us books 5 and 6 to finish the tale. This thing is too good to leave incomplete, but even if it never gets finished, it is still a great read!

Find the stories, read them, and drop the author a line to show you appreciate his work. Because these stories are very good.


Titles
  1. Alexandra Quick and The Thorn Circle
  2. Alexandra Quick and The Lands Below
  3. Alexandra Quick and The Deadly Regiment
  4. Alexandra Quick and The Stars Above
  5. ...
    Just to make sure... I did mention these stories are very good, didn't I?


    Links

     

    No comments:

    Post a Comment