With the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I decided to start from the beginning. Along the way, I miraculously managed to avoid all the spoilers, reviews, message board posts, and conversations about it as I read my way from the scared kid under the stairs all the way through Hogwarts Year 7. I am glad I decided to do it, too. Yeah, it took me longer, and I didn’t finish Deathly Hallows until last weekend or so, but I picked up on alot of little details that I think I probably would have missed otherwise. But don’t worry. As usual, I don’t talk about plot or other spoilers in my reviews. Or if I do I try to veil it in some way. The next several posts will review the individual books in the series, culminating, of course, with the latest, and last, installment. I wrote them all in order, as I finished each book. Below is my take on the series as a whole.

Author: J. K. Rowling

Publisher: Scholastic

Publishing Time Frame: 1999 - 2007

Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy

It’s an interesting thing, this Harry Potter phenomena. J. K. Rowling has been lauded in some circles as the savior of Young Adult Literature and vilified in others as a hack with no clear concept of story construction. I am not well-read enough in YA Lit to have an opinion on the savior part, but the bit about story construction is, in general, dead on. Her technique, or lack of it, flies in the face of everything that is taught in workshops and universities around the globe. She takes too long to truly begin the story, her grammatical inconsistencies leave much to be desired, and her reliance upon the trope is, much of the time, heavy handed. Harry Potter is a fine example of how not to structure a novel.

It is also, perhaps, the single best lesson a writer needs to learn: Story trumps all. Regardless where you stand on the whole savior versus hack issue, J. K. Rowling sure can spin a good yarn. And honestly, I can’t say that proper editing and structural refinement would make the stories she tells any better. Indeed, everything just seems to fit, even the technical and structural stuff that stand out so garishly. The characters she creates are vivid and wonderful. The story is theirs, and even though there are many instances of what seem to be filler, it is the relationships Rowling develops that propel the story forward. Even the dreaded “bad guy” characters must be viewed with a sense of care. You know they are bad. They have always seemed to be bad. You even expect them to be bad. But all the same, somehow you wind up thinking, “no… he wouldn’t do that. Would he?”

It may not be great literature, but it is most definitely great fun.