Great chapter!

This isn't going to end well.

Fantastic chapter!

Oh wow, great chapter!

Wonderful chapter!

Fantastic chapter! I love all of your original characters.

Love this chapter and all the magical things you created like the trollbooth!

She claims that she doesn't allow students to come to harm at her school, but there's been like four incidents where Alex has nearly died. She's a pretty shitty dean if she's doing her best.

This deserves to be it's own book series. Just sayin'.

There is obviously a lot of effort here, in creating so many new characters and a world to house them, and I don't want to undermine that. However, I have to admit that it feels a little bit hollow to me. In comparison to JKR's first HP book, it just isn't as fulfilling a read. Obviously that is a high standard to live up to, and you can't be criticised much for falling short. In any case, I want to try and point out a few of the things that detracted from this story, from my personal experience.

The teachers. You barely introduced them beyond their names and the odd quirk or two. None of them seemed to have any real motivations, except to say that they all pretty much hated or were indifferent toward AQ. Imagine if every Hogwarts class was taught by Snape or Binns. It doesn't sound very fun, does it? This was an ongoing issue, where AQ was given too much stick, and never any carrot. Okay, so Grimm wanted her to become an unremarkable dullard so as not to draw attention to herself... but even then, I feel like... oh, I don't know, a rebel teacher disregarding this memo and pushing AQ to improve herself - something like that - would have made for a nice breather from all the frosty glares and such.

Not enough focus on the school. In turn, rather too much focus on the protagonist. Charmbridge was woefully underdeveloped, in my opinion. The school seemed like a cheap imitation of Hogwarts, what with there not being any ghosts or moving stairways or the like. The Clockwork vs. House Elf political situation was vaguely interesting, but nothing ever came of it, aside from David having an excuse to hide away off-screen. There were never really any iconic settings established within the grounds or inside the castle (... it was a castle, right?). I can remember the noticeboard and the bench outside Grimm's office, and that's about it. I can't honestly recall what Charmbridge's equivalent of the Great Hall was... it just didn't stick with me, if I noticed it at all. Something about having to line up for manual serving?

No school houses, or any real sort of organisational structure at all. In Hogwarts, there was the Slytherin vs. Gryffindor rivalry to look forward to. Here... well, AQ and Larry really hated each other... why? Once again, without looking back, I couldn't tell you. AQ's friends were fairly consistent, but it all stemmed from the setup on the shortbus. Once that part of the story ended, and we arrived at the school, it felt like all thought of cliques and friendships and rivalries had gone out the window. Most of the pronouns used to differentiate were done by grade level, but this is generic and two-dimensional; sorting by age alone is boring. You touched on something in the use of remedial classes, to group students by skill, but alas this was never dwelled on beyond to serve as a mechanism to fuel the fire of AQ's dislike for her teachers. The other stragglers may well have been Clockworks for all their relevance. Effectively, at that point, the whole cast outside of AQ and Friends had been utterly homogenised. Practically runny.

AQ was weak, in more ways than one. She had a lacking fascination with magic, due to having grown up knowing she was a witch. She talked a lot of smack, but at the end of the day she was an unremarkable magical specimen. Perhaps she had some innate talent, but her unwillingness to apply herself in any of the facets of magic just meant that I resented her for being arrogant, not that I was impressed with her unwarranted abilities. She had a knack for flying, but unlike canon HP, she did nothing with it except to get herself in trouble. And for all her vaunted charisma, who did she manipulate? Her friends liked her when perhaps they shouldn't have (which again points toward the Mary Sue trope), but I didn't see anything that would have indicated that AQ brought this about knowingly. Did she get out of tight situations with a silver tongue? Did she win over her enemies? She was supposedly a powerful leader, and yet I can only remember her trying to turn down her friends' help, trying to push them away to protect them. It isn't that she isn't charismatic or in possession of sound leadership skills, but rather that the circumstances surrounding her position within the school led to her being unable to demonstrate even the slightest hint of such traits lest she bring down the metaphorical pain train on those whom she cared for.

It just didn't feel like Harry Potter. AQ had no interest in magic; there was no sense of wonder in our hero. Her determination to uncover the secret of her father is admirable, and intriguing and mysterious for the reader, but it isn't really a very MAGICAL ambition (even if her father did turn out to be a dark wizard). She preferred, at least initially, not using her wand for magic - and why wouldn't she, given she could perform far stronger magic with doggerel verse? Unfortunately, this stripped the value away from most of her classes, and is the antithesis of any story that uses a magical school as its core setting. (Why should she learn traditional magic if she could already outdo her peers with mere rhyme? You mentioned a downside to that form of magic, but we never saw any proof, and so your justification felt weak.) There was no focus on quidditch or flying, or any magical past-times. Detentions were largely limited to students overseeing the menial jobs of robots, as opposed to tiptoeing side-by-side with a half-giant in a forest inhabited by centaurs and unicorns.

It was a bit frustrating to read, really. You are obviously a writer of some talent, and the story was always solid; it never did anything explicitly wrong. It built up toward the end, too. I felt for AQ whenever she was wronged, and I got quite tangibly nervous at some stages, as she got herself in trouble. It just didn't have that wholesome feel. Something was missing.

Please don't take this as just a pile of rude criticism, because I did enjoy the story. I both loved and hated Lilith Grimm. I thought David had promise, and that there was something subtly unnerving about Benedict Journey and his nicknames. The Invisible and Structurally-Unsound Bridge was pretty cool. The shortbus had interesting connotations in the muggle world. I was especially fascinated by, and eager to see more of (and eventually disappointed by the rescission of), the continued hints that AQ was going to become a dark witch. I thought for sure we were at the turning point when Brian turned to the dark-side at her expense (it struck me as very Riddle-esque, wherein a young child is hurt by muggles, and might potentially grow up to field an unsavoury opinions on non-magical blood), but alas it was not to be.

Nine years too late, but analysis like this helps me as much as anyone else, so whatever. Hopefully I've said something others haven't.

Fantastic story!
I was just searching something...outside the box of usual fanfictions on Harry Potter when I found yours.
Great characterization, the setting is interesting and the story is really well written.
Great job!

great story! I am really impressed with the American version of the magical world you have created.

Moral of the story: teenagers in America are horrible

I've only started reading AQ yesterday and I instantly fell in love with it, you make everything come alive and the world you've created almost sounds real like the Britain wizarding world of JKR. So far I love David who while unafraid to speak up, is more logical and less reckless than Alex, and Dean Grimm, who runs the school with an iron fist and doesn't know what to make of Alex. I know I'm suppose to root for Alex and I do enjoy her pushing the limits of the authorities but sometimes she's just too much, you'd think she'd learn from all these troubles she's been in - and then five minutes later she's got in a fight or something again

And with that, Alexandra is more her own person than her father's. Excellent work!