Reviews for the September, 2012 Snarry Reader Update

[snarry_reader]

Review: A Certain Kind of Fool
Title: A Certain Kind of Fool
Author: asnowyowl
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 38,700 words
Warning(s): (highlight for spoilers) *Partially epilogue compliant. Includes rimming*
Summary: For Severus, everything changes when Harry and his children move into Hogwarts. Albus Severus has taken a liking to him and it seems Harry Potter has a secret.

Asnowyowl’s "A Certain Kind of Fool" is one of those stories that ranks high on my personal list of comfort fic – stories you go back to again and again for their warmth and richness. In this epilogue-compliant Snarry, Harry is a widower who has been hired to fill the Muggle Studies position at Hogwarts, and he arrives with his young, rambunctious family in tow, much to the chagrin of the resident Potions Master. Harry’s reasons for taking the position, and the inner workings of his marriage to Ginny Weasley, form the compelling backbone of this story, but its magic lies in the way young Albus Severus first winnows his way into Snape’s life and heart, his siblings and, finally, his father close in tow. The Snape of this story is everything suspicious and self-protecting, a lonely soul who allows himself the luxury of the affection unselfconsciously lavished on him by the grieving four year-old, and it’s only against his bitter, better judgment that Snape becomes a fixture in the lives of this small family-in-flux. While misunderstandings may strew the path to happily ever after, it does come, wrapped in a particularly tasty epilogue that has a little present for the possessive!Snape lover in us all.


Review: "A Match Made in Ottery St. Catchpole
Title: A Match Made in Ottery St. Catchpole
Author: bk7brokemybrain
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 15,507
Warning(s): (highlight for spoilers) *Attempted non-con, cross-dressing*
Summary: Severus Snape and Harry Potter try to find lasting love and companionship - just not with each other.

If you only read the last two scenes of "A Match Made in Ottery St. Catchpole," you might be forgiven for thinking you'd stumbled into one of the hottest PWPs in Snarrydom - but you'd be wrong. "A Match Made in Ottery St. Catchpole" is, first and foremost, a wonderfully warm romance between a lonely, yearning Harry and an equally lonely, and characteristically stubborn, Snape. They enter into each other's social orbit with the marriage of Ginny Weasley to Draco Malfoy, and at every Burrow occasion and every Ministry affair, they draw closer and closer to one another without ever quite meeting in the middle. Despite any number of tantalizingly close calls - one, when Snape preserves Harry's honor against a would-be assailant, one occurring on a wildly romantic Boxing Day, when Harry meets Snape under the mistletoe - Snape manages to convince himself that it would never work, and Harry is too trusting to argue with him. True love remains just out of their grasp until a very pregnant (and frighteningly formidable) Ginny Weasley, aided and abetted by an assortment of Gryffindors and one scheming Slytherin, conspire to make Severus an offer of Harry he can't refuse. The garden party that ensues includes easily one of the best identity reveals in all Snarrydom: wildly romantic, swoon-worthily sexy, and absolutely hysterical. Sweet, earnest Harry and a fabulously possessive Snape - what more could a reader ask for?


Review: Tea Time
Title: Tea Time
Author: torino10154
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 1,330
Warning(s): (highlight for spoilers) *PWP, oral, facial, dubious use of potions*
Summary: "I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world." ~Oscar Wilde

When is a PWP not just a PWP? When it's written like this. It's easy to overlook short fics, but, as "Tea Time" shows, to do so is to miss something that's memorable because it's concise. Here, Harry and Severus are living in happily-ever-after bliss - Harry hungers for Severus, and Severus shares the same overwhelming need for Harry. They make passionate love daily, with Harry eagerly submitting to a swoon-worthily possessive Severus. Yet, all is not quite as it seems. Nestled within a teatime ritual that appears the very picture of domestic tranquility is something darker that cuts to the quick of each man's insecurities. In less than 1,500 words, torino10154 gives us an unforgettably incisive (and just a little heartbreaking) glimpse of a love perpetuated through both mutual desire and mutual mistrust. To give it a pass because it's short is to miss something wonderfully complex and rich.


Review: The Two of a Kind Series
Title: The Two of a Kind Series
Author: torino10154
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 8,537 total words
Warning(s): (highlight for spoilers) *Non-magic AU*
Summary: Factory foreman, Severus Snape, is a man of few words and even fewer creature comforts. As he gets to know and understand more about his employee, Harry Potter, in each installment of the series, their relations develops slowly into one of mutual understanding and comfort. Non-magic AU.

In the "Two of a Kind" series, Torino10154 skillfully distills Snape and Harry – here an austere factory foreman and his young, unattached employee, respectively – to the essence of their compelling personalities, and plays them out against an AU backdrop that at once accentuates and reflects the men themselves. The Snape of this series of ficlets is a man of few words and even fewer creature comforts, who responds to Harry’s soft-spoken selflessness and the loneliness lurking behind his smiles with an invitation to pass Christmas together. The hours they spend together slowly, and unexpectedly, draw out feelings of concern for the young man’s well-being in Snape, and soon one day becomes many, until they are roommates and even friends of a sort. Each man’s growing awareness of the other plays out through scenes of tender, delicate quietude, and it is this atmosphere, and the way it suits these characters so perfectly, that makes this series such a treasure. Here are a Snape and Harry we recognize, but their AU environs draws out aspects of each that are all the more satisfying for their uniqueness


Review: "Uneasy Relations"
Title: Uneasy Relations
Author: centaury_squill
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: Approx 12,500
Content/Warning(s): (highlight for spoilers) *Rimming, blowjob, rude anagrams*
Summary: Kingsley Shacklebolt gives Auror Harry Potter an important mission.

For me, one of the great attractions of Snarry is the extent to which Harry's and Snape's lives intersect, and Petunia Dursley (nee Evans) is one of the most enigmatic things that they have in common. In "Uneasy Relations," this commonality is used to amazing effect, the impetus for a growing attraction between Severus and Harry that can only end in one place. Harry, an Auror, is sent to bring Snape in from the cold, all while evading the notice of any Death Eaters out to kill him. When it turns out that Harry needs some saving of his own, the two wind up at the Wales residence of a pleasingly sympathetic Dudley Dursley, his wife, baby, and mother. Snape seems to take as much pleasure in offending Petunia as he ever did as a boy, with singularly intriguing consequences for Harry - who, if a bit confused by the proceedings, is willing enough to play along, first for the sake of irritating Petunia, and then for himself. What begins as a performance played largely for Petunia's benefit evolves into something more mutually pleasurable for Severus and Harry, and the trip is, by turns, funny, mysterious, and oddly touching. With dirty anagrams to boot.