Surpassing Danger

Dangerverse #5

by Anne B. Walsh

Harry Potter is Marauder-trained and Warrior-chosen. When he stands united with his Pack and Pride, evil has no chance, but Lord Voldemort is a past master of dividing and conquering... Years Six and Seven

Genres: Fan Fiction, Fantasy

1098 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Anne B. Walsh has been telling stories from the time she could talk, but it took her twenty years to realize she could make a living at it. She left her office job on a leap of faith two months before seeing a PBS special which changed her life. The resulting four-book series of historical fantasy romances is known collectively as the Chronicles of Glenscar (or will be, when it involves more than one book!).

Anne lives east of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with her roommate Krystal. They are owned by a pair of needy, and kneady, cats named Poppy and Sesame. Her parents and siblings live two hours north, otherwise known as just far enough away.

She has been writing Harry Potter fan fiction for almost eight years and is known best in that genre as the creator of the "Dangerverse" alternate universe. Beyond writing fiction, Anne's preoccupations include reading fiction; singing anywhere that will have her, including her church and local galas; theatre, especially musicals; all forms of cooking; and her family and friends.

Within writing fiction, her preoccupations are much the same, meaning most of her stories involve loving families, delicious food, and good music. Consider yourself warned.

A number of projects are awaiting Anne's attention now that she has completed her first original novel. Among these are the final novel-length work in the Dangerverse, "Surpassing Danger", and her first personal anthology, "Cat Tales", a collection of short fiction featuring cats and cat-like beings, including a short prequel to "A Widow in Waiting" and a story from her original Trycanta universe.

Reviews

[Selena · Rating 3 out of 5]

The more I re-read this the more frustrated and annoyed I get. It's great that the Houses are all involved and there's more about the impact on the Muggle-borns, but nothing about how not having Muggle-borns and half-bloods impacts the Wizard world, since we get to see life outside Hogwarts. Or how they are going after half-bloods and blood-traitors, etc. As with so much, we hear one sentence, way after the fact casually dropped into conversation or narration that ought to have been brought up long before.

A lot of anachronism. As per canon, the Bloody Baron is alive too early to be a Baron (they didn't exist until after 1066), and his son's generation wouldn't have been alive during the Norman Conquest, which was seventy years after Hogwarts was founded. So the whole Founders and their grandchildren storyline doesn't make sense. Nor does the whole bit with Merlin (and everyone else it seems) and time-traveling. So many ridiculous and unnecessary plots.

I've mostly enjoyed reading these fics, but they're WAY too long. A large part of the problem is that the flowery, convoluted prose. It'll say "He frowned for a moment, contemplating the face of the serene, red-haired woman so named, but then shook the mood from him," when you don't need the "so named" and things like that. Things like this make the writing unnecessarily convoluted and confusing, especially when so many scenes don't identify the speaker, like "From her place of concealment in a stand of trees near the village, the watcher lay in wait. Her juniors approached at a leisurely walk, the one who carried the child wearing the same House badge as her own, the other branded with the mark of their rival." Just spit it out. And also, give us timelines, half these scenes could be taking place all at once and you can't tell. And it really doesn't help that so many scenes are split up (like Nott getting captured), it's hard to understand.

And speaking of spitting it out, nothing is a surprise, there are no cliffhangers because everything is talked about to death (like Dumbledore and Draco not being dead) and it's so obvious. That'd make the fic 1/3 the length too. And so would taking out all the ridiculous plots like 2 other kinds of Horcruxes, the unnecessary DA stuff that gets thrown in months later or never used outside of being mentioned in passing.

Plus nothing bad happens. The Red Shepherds seem to never get caught and catch their prey. The Muggle-borns are safe, the DEs ought to go after the blood-traitors next but you don't see any of that, Hogwarts is completely ignored when there ought to be the DA fighting against the Carrows and most egregiously Sirius, Remus and Danger are there? Seriously? It doesn't make any sense. They ought to have been imprisoned on sight. Would have been nice to see a Hogwarts year without the Pride, especially Meghan, who is the most annoying character who makes the stupidest mistakes that (almost) screw things up unnecessarily. Slytherin would have forced her to mature. It would have been a much better story without her.

So many abandoned plots. The things the Red Shepherds and Order are doing are left unsaid, the Pepper Pot disappears. The Final Battle comes and all that training goes to waste. And somehow Voldemort dies even through he's been turned into a ghost or something. And the DEs all die because he takes their life force. It just gets ridiculous. As do all of the "people who really weren't dead": Dumbledore, Danger, Remus, Draco, Snape (well for Voldemort) and the like.

The chapter-length info-dump at the end was quite unnecessary.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't really know what to say about this story, or the previous four in the series. But I'll try it anyway.

First of all, the writing itself, and by that I mean grammar, spelling, word choice, sentence structure etc., is without fault at all. I actually really like the way Anne writes, except for the thing she does where character A does a thing and character B explains to the reader, usually in his/her inner speech, 'well, A is doing this, but only because of that, and I know they actually mean this' as if the reader was completely incapable of deducing even the tiniest little thing for themselves.

I really have a weird relationship with this series. I first read it during an extremely difficult time in my life, and found it a comforting constant. (That was before the series was finished, so I could look forward to updates soon.) I then re-read it last year during another challenging life change and drew the same comfort from it. In that sense, I am extremely grateful to Anne for creating a MASSIVE universe into which I could immerse myself without fear of it ending soon. The themes of family and friendship and hope and heaven were and remain to be immensely comforting to me, maybe even more so than the original Harry Potter books.

That said, the same comfort could also be considered the series' weak spot. Nothing truly bad ever happens to the severely overpowered main characters, .and what does happens is reversed soon.. This makes it hard to feel real suspense, and sometimes the story is drowned out by saccharine conversations between one of the couples, which is probably one of the reasons that it is soooo long.

I also had some problems with all the children ending up with their one true love within their teens, and those true loves just happening to be people within their group, and pretty much everyone else finding a partner in school as well. Group outsiders were often treated with disdain, like Cho, whose characterization here is pretty close to the Ron, the Death Eater trope. The character deaths differ from the original books in such a way that I wonder whether the author didn't just kill off only characters she didn't like or couldn't pair up with anyone. The whole pack and pride thing and even people like Voldemort going along in calling them that also seemed kind of ridiculous. .I wasn't too fond of 16-year-old Ginny getting married, either.. The early coupling - but without any mention of sex, with the only characters who had sex out of wedlock that we know of ending up with a baby - and the lack of LGBTQ characters makes this read a tad like Christian propaganda. I do give the author props for the character of Aletha being black, though.

So, to sum it up, this series means a lot to me, but it also has quite a few flaws, and I always hesitate recommending this to other HP fans because some communities will not take you seriously ever again if you mention liking this. But I stand by my opinion that this i gold as a looooooooooooooooong comfort read if anyone ever needs one.

[Sunjay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still weird that all the characters were straight

[Jenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

As with all of Anne's books, I loved this! This was my second read through and I still cried when Draco was captured, and tons of other parts that I won't mention because they will make me sad all over again. She has such a great way of making you feel like you really know the characters. Even though you know everything will turn out alright in the end, because that's just the way things tend to go, you can't help feeling upset when bad things happen. Loved it!