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Reviews For To Trust
You are a marvelously, welcome exception: Your writing skills are flawless; your execution and premise are BRILLIANT and YOU 'GET IT'! I understand that you decided to show the abuse that Harry suffered as CANON-PLUS, but, considering that Rowling wouldn't know ABUSE if it hit HER in the face, I believe that she would have downplayed it and dismissed it, just as callously and cavalierly as she did in canon, BUT YOU DIDN'T!! Thank you, THANK YOU for doing what was RIGHT instead of what would have been EASIER! I'm looking forward to reading your other offerings and anything ELSE you write, in the future! Brava, child, BRAVA! MelJ (54 year old bibliophile and Fantasy, Sci-Fi, and HP FAN FICTION, addict!)
I love that you took the time to slowly escalate the relationship between Snape and Harry. I also love that you didn't make Snape protest to taking Harry in. So many fics (while well-done) have a cliched fight between Dumbledore and Snape where Dumbledore finally convinces Snape to take him in. I like the grudging agreement here. One weakness was the Dumbledore story-line. It is so hard to realistically make Dumbledore ignorant of that level of abuse/Harry living on the streets for a year+ without Dumbledore-bashing (which I am not fond of) and in this case I felt that it was a touch to unrealistic he did not know about Harry being on the streets. On the whole though, this was a brilliant story. I particularly enjoyed your descriptions of magic and the correlations between magic and muggle science. I'll be looking forward to the one-shots!!
Okay, where to start. It is admittedly really difficult to formulate a worthy review to this work. I should probably start with the easiest thing and hope I won't drift off to rambling. This is brilliant. You did incredibly well. I can't even formulate what exactly I liked most about this story. I don't have words to properly tell you what it did to me, emotionally. The characterizations are brilliant, obviously, otherwise I wouldn't have read this to the end and would even less be trying to type and adequate response right now. What I liked most is probably that through all this, Snape was still Snape, and he didn't change suddenly, and there was no miracle, and he stayed himself throughout the whole thing. Harry is another thing entirely, and I can't even tell you how grateful I am for the obvious empathy and research you put into creating his character. Writing an abused child is never easy, especially not one that has dealt with so many forms of abuse. I also am incredibly impressed with the way you wove the things Harry's past contained in here. I have read so many fanfictions where the author, in an obvious attempt to shock, wrote out the abuse itself in far too much clarity while already telling the reader what they had to feel about it, and everyone was immediately outraged and it was totally unrealistic. Seriously, I know it's not easy, but those attempts make it so painfully obvious that their creator never really was in a similar situation, knew someone who was, or even took the time to inform themselves about people who were. Subtlety, in that regard, works way better. It creates this numbly nauseating feeling in the pit of your stomach; it nudges your mind in the direction of creating the pictures that are not clearly lined out for you, but merely hinted upon; and most of all, it makes the whole thing painfully realistic. Being a child in an environment such as Harry's is painful. The worst part of that is that it ALWAYS makes you search yourself for mistakes. It makes you believe you are at fault, you are somehow wrong, it's something you did, and it makes you ashamed of yourself and everything that has happened to you. Talking about it is always the hardest part, as one tends to try to forget about the past pain. A child in a situation such as Harry's would not try to talk about it, but would try to hide it. It would not trust anyone and instead always be on the lookout for possible threats. It would desperately seek help and in the same instant be impossibly afraid of actually receiving help, because it would not think it deserved to be helped at all. In other words, you pictured Harry remarkably well. I also appreciate how you let Harry never actually talk about the sexual abuse he has suffered. While everyone seems to think it important to talk about such things, it is not something that actually happens unless one is forced to do so, usually. I find myself quite unable to talk about it to this day, and it was not even near as bad as what happened to Harry. Obviously, I enjoyed your storytelling quite a lot. You never let it get boring, you let the characters tell their story at their own pace, you didn't write about unnecessary things but didn't only focus on drama, either (which, quite frankly, would have ruined the whole thing). You didn't insert an enemy, and I am so, so, so thankful for that. For focusing on what this is about and not attempt to further the dramatic levels by creating something other than psychological damage and trauma to fight against. There are far too little stories that accomplish that. You have truly done great here. Your linguistic abilities needn't even be discussed, I'm sure. You would never have been able to write Snape correctly and create an eloquent Harry, had you not the ability to use words quite cleverly yourself. Your grammar was much appreciated, as well. Really, really appreciated, considering the amount of badly written fanfictions I've found lately... :S Besides a few small mistakes such as using a word twice in a sentence, or writing "that" instead of "than" and such things, this was all entirely well written, and enjoyed it thoroughly. So, concluding that statement; THANK YOU so much for creating and sharing this :) It is much appreciated and I just wanted to let you know :) You did such an incredibly good job about it, I'm not even sure I remembered to put everything in here I noticed ^^; I don't know if you are still taking inspirations considering the oneshot sequels to this, or if you even still plan on writing some... I haven't even read the one you did write yet. But in case you do plan on writing some more, I thought I'd let you know what I had hoped could have happened. I would really like Harry to come in contact with Jade again, in any form. He could hear something about her by chance, walk past her in some city without her even noticing him, he could ask Snape or look in books for ways to find a person and attempt to find her just to know where she is and how she is; hell, he could even find out that she didn't actually get to live with her mom all this time ago, but died. Which would be incredibly depressing, but sadly rather realistic. I would love for the two of them to have some sort of contact, but as stated above, they wouldn't even need to. I just don't like this state of not-knowing very much. So. I think that was it :) Again, thanks a lot for sharing this, and compliments to you and your amazing talent for creating stories :)
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