Title: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Author: JK Rowling

Publisher: Scholastic

Year Published: 1997

Harry Potter. A young, know-nothing wizard stumbles from the non-magical world in which he was raised into the magical world of Hogwarts. Trolls, dragons, three-headed dogs, and, of course, magic, all wrapped up and placed in perhaps the most dreaded setting in all of Young Adult Literature… school. What’s not to like?

For me, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone quickly turned into a guilty pleasure. In my gut, I knew that what I was reading wasn’t technically proficient writing. But the story itself was just too good to put down. It isn’t a must read book by any means, but if you are one of the eight or nine people on the planet who haven’t read it, I can heartily recommend it as a guilty pleasure kind of beach-book. I haven’t read as “fun” a book as this in a long, long time.

Title: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Author: JK Rowling

Publisher: Scholastic

Year Published: 1999

Chamber of Secrets slips a bit, in my view. Quite a bit, actually. The biggest problem is that it takes Rowling almost 150 pages to get to the story. Those first pages are all preamble; cute, somewhat interesting scenes that don’t seem interconnected in any way other than they all have the same characters.

Once the story gets started, however, it isn’t long at all before I am right back to where I was with Sorcerer’s Stone. Muggle-born students are dropping like flies, and everyone thinks Harry is behind it. So, of course, Harry, Ron, and Hermione simply must play detective in an attempt to solve the mystery of who is really behind the attacks.

The only let down (after page 150, at any rate) is the end when Harry goes on a “let me tell you how I figured it all out” bender with Dumbledore and Mr. Malfoy. Reminiscent of those really cheesy detective movies, it is an attempt to explain the almost ambiguousness of those first 150 pages. Going back and looking at those pages again, there is no evidence in the text itself that supports the suppositions Harry makes other than simple location references. It is, in effect, a trick that Rowling uses in order to keep the reader in the dark until those final ten to twenty pages. On the one hand it is justifiable, as the story is told in third-person limited. On the other hand, however, it is a letdown that this unknown information is sprung on the reader by the character the narration is so totally focused on. If I know what Harry knows, and Harry is able to “put the pieces together” as it were, then those pieces should be present for me to put together as well. Otherwise it has the effect of a cheesy “dues-ex-machina” kind of ending. It is still a good book, but I walked away ready to read something decidedly non-Potterish.