Anastasio Attanasio alias Ricky and the Forest of Montegufo - chapter one

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Anastasio Attanasio, alias Ricky, was the youngest of five children, each born a few years after the other. Some had left home and rarely returned; and when the youngest, Maria Alba Caterina (or Ketty), boarded the Zeppelin for Beauxbatons, there was nobody to keep an eye on him when his father was at work

Comments

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Fun -- so Ricky is still a little troublemaker. I guess he learned his lesson about tormenting cats, but he doesn't seem to have generalized it; perhaps he needs a visit from the King of Fowl, too. ;)

I like zeppelins, too, though I don't think they quite fit in the Harry Potter world. They seem more steampunkish to me.

There's an element to your writing style in this story that is both good and bad. It has a formal storybook kind of feel to it that is reminiscent of classic children's fairy tales, but some individual sentences become a little bit too stilted, especially in dialog.

Some other small nitpicks:

1. The first paragraph is confusing, as you first refer to Ricky as the youngest of five children, but then say "when the youngest, Maria Alba Caterina (or Ketty), boarded the Zeppelin..." I assume what you meant was the youngest among all his other siblings, but that's not clear here.

2. Ricky has a wand at age eight? You'll probably need to explain how these things are done in the Italian wizarding world. In the British wizarding world, it seems to be the norm that children don't get wands until they go off to school, so I'm wondering why on earth Ricky's father gave him a wand, and why he hasn't taken it away from him? Ricky is obviously dangerous enough unsupervised without a wand!

3. I don't recall whether Ricky's mother was mentioned in one of the earlier chapters, but I am wondering why she is completely absent here. If she's dead or otherwise gone, it should be mentioned by way of explaining why there is no one else to look after him.

4. Ricky seems like a bit of a crybaby. For such a troublemaker, surely this isn't the first time his father has threatened him with some dire punishment? Is that deliberate? If so, the impression I get is that he's quite spoiled and his father has been ineffective at instilling discipline thus far, which means his tears are probably just a tactic he's learned to effectively avoid punishment.

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He wasn't actually having fun with the fowl. As will come out in the next chapter, he was counting them - and needed the space in the largest room in the house. That's the kind of dumb idea a bored, lonely kid is apt to come up with.

Well, but isn't a steaming red magical locomotive as steampunk as they come? Or a flying Ford Anglia, even?

Numbered points:
1) You are quite right, of course. Must clarify.
2) That is part of the institutional weakness of the Italian Ministry. Traditions and disciplines vary from place to place, almost from family to family, and enforcing a nationwide discipline is not easy. The Attanasios themselves would be the first to complain if their own ideas of when to give a child his wand were interfered with.
3) Heh... heh... heh...
4) One thing that will come out in this story is that Ricky's father is not only minister, but quite a powerful wizard in his own right. Ricky has an exaggerated idea of what he can do and of what punishments are possible in the Wizarding World, caught from storybooks. And besides, remember that children of that age have no sense of humour, and in particular no idea of irony. I well remember that at that age, the harmless city of Verona became one of my own chief terrors, because an exasperated nun (dinnertime at junior school, you do the maths) had threatened to put me in a suitcase and ship me there.