Book Review

Harry Potter is a series of seven fantasy novels written by British author J. K. Rowling. The books chronicle the adventures of the eponymous adolescent wizard Harry Potter, together with Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, his best friends. The central story arc concerns Harry's struggle against the evil wizard Lord Voldemort, who killed Harry's parents in his quest to conquer the wizarding world, after which he seeks to subjugate the Muggle (non-magical) world to his rule.
Since the release of the first novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 1997, which was retitled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in the United States, the books have gained immense popularity, critical acclaim and commercial success worldwide.[2] The series has spawned films, video games and Potter-themed merchandise. As of April 2007, the first six books in the seven book series have sold more than 400 million copies[3] and have been translated into more than 64 languages.[4] The seventh and last book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was released on 21 July 2007.[5] Publishers announced a record-breaking 12 million copies for the first print run in the U.S. alone.[6]
The success of the novels has made Rowling the highest-earning novelist in history.[7] English language versions of the books are published by Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom, Scholastic Press in the United States, Allen & Unwin in Australia, and Raincoast Books in Canada.
Thus far, the first five books have been made into a series of motion pictures by Warner Bros. The sixth, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, began filming in September 2007, with a scheduled release of 21 November 2008.[8] The series also originated much tie-in merchandise, making the Harry Potter brand worth $15 billion.[9]
Contents[hide]
1 Overview
1.1 Plot summary
1.2 Universe
1.3 Chronology
2 Series
2.1 Origins and publishing history
2.2 Completion of the series
2.3 After Deathly Hallows
2.4 Translations
3 Literary analysis
3.1 Structure and genre
3.2 Themes
4 Achievements
4.1 Cultural impact
4.2 Awards and honours
4.3 Commercial success
5 Criticism, praise, and controversy
5.1 Literary critics
5.2 Controversy
6 Other media
6.1 Films
6.2 Games
6.3 Theme park
6.4 Theatre
7 See also
8 References
9 Harry Potter books
10 External links
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Overview

Plot summary
The story opens with the conspicuous celebration of a normally secretive wizarding world; for many years, it has been terrorised by the evil wizard, Lord Voldemort. On the previous night, October 31, Voldemort discovered the Potter family's hidden refuge, killing Lily and James Potter. However, when he attempted to murder their toddler son, Harry, the Avada Kedavra killing curse he cast rebounded upon him. Voldemort's body was destroyed, but his spirit survived: he is neither dead nor alive. Meanwhile, the orphaned Harry is left with a distinctive lightning bolt-shaped scar on his forehead, the only physical sign of Voldemort's curse. Harry is the only known survivor of the curse, and Voldemort's mysterious defeat causes the wizarding community to dub Harry "The Boy Who Lived". Harry (and the Dursleys) are protected by the enchantment that was produced when Harry's mother died while protecting him from Voldemort. This protection will last until his 17th birthday.
On November 1, Hagrid, a 'half-giant', delivers Harry to his only living relatives, the cruel and magic-phobic Dursleys, comprising Uncle Vernon, a bad-tempered uncle; Aunt Petunia, a woman who appears to absolutely loathe Harry; and Dudley, their spoiled and overweight son. The Dursleys are in the words of Professor McGonagall, "the worst sort of Muggles imaginable" and seek to deny Harry his magical birthright by making up a false story about Harry's parents dying in a car accident. They treat Harry as a slave and force him to live in a small, cramped closet under the stairs at their Privet Drive home.
However, as his eleventh birthday approaches, Harry has his first contact with the magical world when he begins receiving letters from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, which are delivered by owls. Unfortunately, his uncle confiscates the letters before he can read them. Much to the Dursley's chagrin, Hogwarts is aware that Harry is not receiving the letters. However, the letters keep coming and Uncle Vernon decides to move the family (Harry included) to a deserted island off the coast, hoping that the letters will cease. At the stroke of midnight on Harry's eleventh birthday, Rubeus Hagrid (Hogwarts half-giant gamekeeper) kicks in the door of the house where they are staying, and presents Harry with a letter explaining that he is a wizard and has been selected to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Each book chronicles one year in Harry's life, which is mostly spent at Hogwarts. There he learns to use magic and brew potions. Harry also learns to overcome many magical, social, and emotional hurdles as he struggles through his adolescence, Voldemort's second rise to power, and the Ministry of Magic's corruption and incompetence. After facing many obstacles, forging lasting friendships, and losing countless loved ones, Harry Potter confronts the Dark Lord for the last time, and only one will survive.
For a detailed synopsis of the novels, see the relevant article for each book.

Universe
Main article: Harry Potter universe

Hogwarts school, as depicted in the first film
The wizarding world in which Harry finds himself is both completely separate from and yet intimately connected to our own world. While the fantasy world of Narnia is an alternative universe and the Lord of the Rings’ Middle-earth a mythic past, the wizarding world of Harry Potter exists alongside that of the real world and contains magical elements similar to things in the non-magical world. Many of its institutions and locations are in towns and cities, including London for example, which are recognisable in the real world. It possesses a fragmented collection of hidden streets, overlooked and ancient pubs, lonely country manors and secluded castles that remain invisible to the non-magical population (known as "Muggles"; e.g. the world of the reader). Wizard ability is inborn, rather than learned, although one must attend schools such as Hogwarts in order to master and control it. However, it is possible for wizard parents to have children who are born with little or no magical ability at all (known as "Squibs"; e.g., Mrs. Figg, Argus Filch). Since one is either born a wizard or not, most wizards are unfamiliar with the Muggle world. The magical world and its many fantastic elements are depicted in a matter-of-fact way. This juxtaposition of the magical and the mundane is one of the principal motifs in the novels; the characters in the stories live normal lives with normal problems, for all their magical surroundings.
Chronology
Main article: Chronology of the Harry Potter stories
The books mainly avoid setting the story in a particular real year; however, there are a few references, which allow the books, and various past events mentioned in them to be assigned corresponding real years. The time line is sufficiently set in Chamber of Secrets, in which Nearly-Headless Nick remarks that it is the five-hundredth anniversary of his death on October 31, 1492; thus, Chamber of Secrets takes place from 1992 to 1993. This chronology was again reiterated in Deathly Hallows, in which the date of death on James and Lily Potter's gravestone is October 31, 1981. Thus, as Harry was a year old at the time of his parents' murders, his year of birth is 1980 and the main action of the story takes place from 1991 (the second chapter of Philosopher's Stone) to 1998 (the end of Deathly Hallows). Interviewed for an ITV documentary broadcast in December 2007, Rowling stated that the final battle with Voldemort's forces takes place on 2 May 1997, however, this would seem to be a mistake, and that the actual date should be 2 May 1998, fitting in with the dates given in Chamber of Secrets and Deathly Hallows.

Series
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (26 June 1997) (titled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in the United States)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (released 2 July 1998)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (8 July 1999)
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (8 July 2000)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (21 June 2003)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (16 July 2005)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (21 July 2007)
All seven books in the series have been released in the English language as audiobooks. The UK editions are performed by Stephen Fry, while the American versions by Jim Dale.
Supplementary books
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2001)
Quidditch Through the Ages (2001)
The Tales of Beedle the Bard (2007)

Origins and publishing history

Cover of the UK children's edition of the first Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone; a more austere design was later made available for adult readers
In 1990, J. K. Rowling was on a crowded train from Manchester to London when the idea for Harry suddenly formed in her mind. Rowling gives an account of the experience on her website saying:[10]
“
I had been writing almost continuously since the age of six but I had never been so excited about an idea before. I simply sat and thought, for four (delayed train) hours, and all the details bubbled up in my brain, and this scrawny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who did not know he was a wizard became more and more real to me.
”
In 1995, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was completed and the manuscript was sent off to prospective agents. The second agent she tried, Christopher Little, offered to represent her and sent the manuscript to Bloomsbury. After eight other publishers had rejected Philosopher's Stone, Bloomsbury offered Rowling a £2,500 advance for its publication.[11]
Despite Rowling's statement that she did not have any particular age group in mind when she began to write the Harry Potter books, the publishers initially targeted them at children age nine to eleven.[12] On the eve of publishing, Joanne Rowling was asked by her publishers to adopt a more gender-neutral pen name, in order to appeal to the male members of this age group, fearing that they would not be interested in reading a novel they knew to be written by a woman. She elected to use J. K. Rowling (Joanne Kathleen Rowling), using her grandmother's name as her second name, because she has no middle name.[13]
The first Harry Potter book was published in the United Kingdom by Bloomsbury in July 1997 and in the United States by Scholastic in September 1998, but not before Rowling had received $105,000 for the American rights – an unprecedented amount for a children's book by a then unknown author.[14] Fearing that American readers would not associate the word "philosopher" with a magical theme (as a Philosopher's Stone is alchemy-related), Scholastic insisted that the book be given the title Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone for the American market.
Rowling's publishers were able to capitalise on this buzz by the rapid, successive releases of the first four books that allowed neither Rowling's audience's excitement nor interest to wane while she took a break from writing between the release of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and also quickly solidified a loyal readership.[15] The series has also gathered adult fans, leading to two editions of each Harry Potter book being released (in markets other than the United States), identical in text but with one edition's cover artwork aimed at children and the other aimed at adults.

Completion of the series
In December 2005, Rowling stated on her web site, "2006 will be the year when I write the final book in the Harry Potter series." Updates have since followed in her online diary chronicling the progress of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, with the release date of 21 July 2007.
The book itself was finished on 11 January 2007 in the Balmoral Hotel, Edinburgh, where she scrawled a message on the back of a bust of Hermes. It read: “JK Rowling finished writing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in this room (652) on 11 January 2007.”[16]
Rowling herself has stated that the last chapter of the seventh book (in fact, the epilogue) was completed "in something like 1990".[17][18]
In June 2006, Rowling, on an appearance on the British talk show Richard & Judy, announced that the chapter had been modified as one character "got a reprieve" and two others who previously survived the story had in fact been killed. She also said she could see the logic in killing off Harry to stop other writers from writing books about Harry's life after Hogwarts.[19]
On March 28, 2007, the cover art for the Bloomsbury Adult and Child versions and the Scholastic version were released.[20]

After Deathly Hallows
Rowling spent seventeen years writing the seven Harry Potter books. In a 2000 interview through Scholastic, her American publisher, Rowling stated that there is not a university after Hogwarts. Concerning the series continuing past book seven, she stated, "I will not say never, but I have no plans to write an eighth book."[21] She has since said that if she does write an eighth book Harry Potter will not be the central character, as his story has been told, and that she would not begin such a project for at least ten years.[22]
When asked about writing other Harry Potter-related books similar to Quidditch Through the Ages and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, she has said that she might consider doing this with proceeds donated to charity, as was the case with those two books. Another suggestion is an encyclopaedia-style tome containing information that never made it into the series, also for charity.[23] She has revealed she is currently penning two books, one for children and one not for children.[24]
In February 2007 Rowling issued a statement on her website about finishing the final book, in which she compared her mixed feelings of "mourning" and "incredible sense of achievement" to those expressed by Charles Dickens in the preface of the 1850 edition of David Copperfield, "a two-years' imaginative task." "To which," she added, "I can only sigh, try seventeen years, Charles…"
On July 24, 2007, Rowling announced in an interview that she "probably will" write an encyclopaedia of the Harry Potter world, which would include background information cut from the narrative as well as post-Deathly Hallows information, including details of what happens to the other characters, who the new Hogwarts headmaster is, and more.[25] Rowling refers to the encyclopedia as the "Scottish Book", a take on the Scottish play.[26]
In a 90-minute live Web chat, Rowling revealed[27] what several of the characters did in the years between the conclusion of the book and the epilogue.

Translations

The cover of Harry Potter en de Steen der Wijzen—the Dutch language translation of the first book, jointly published by De Harmonie and Standaard.
Main article: Harry Potter in translation
The series has been translated into 65 languages,[28] placing Rowling among the most translated authors in history.[29] The first translation was into American English, as many words and concepts used by the characters in the novels may have been misleading to a young American audience. Subsequently the books have seen translations in languages as diverse as Ukrainian, Hindi, Bengali, Welsh, Afrikaans and Vietnamese. The first volume has been translated into Latin and even Ancient Greek,[30] making it the longest published work in that language since the novels of Heliodorus of Emesa in the 3rd century AD.[31]
The high profile and huge public demand for a decent local translation means that a great deal of care is often taken in the task. In some countries such as Italy, the first book was revised by the publishers and issued in an updated edition, in response to feedback from readers. In countries such as China and Portugal, the translation is conducted by a group of translators working together to save time. Some of the translators hired to work on the books were quite well known prior to their work on Harry Potter, such as Viktor Golyshev, who oversaw the Russian translation of the series' fifth book. Golyshev was previously best known for translating William Faulkner and George Orwell;[32] his tendency to snub the Harry Potter books in interviews and refer to them as inferior literature may be the reason he did not return to work on later books in the series. The Turkish translation of books two to seven was undertaken by Sevin Okyay, a popular literary critic and cultural commentator.[33] For reasons of secrecy, translation can only start when the books are released in English; thus there is a lag of several months before the translations are available. This has led to more and more copies of the English editions being sold to impatient fans in non-English speaking countries. Such was the clamour to read the fifth book that its English language edition became the first English-language book ever to top the bestseller list in France.[34]

Literary analysis

Structure and genre
See also: Harry Potter influences and analogues
The novels are very much in the fantasy genre; in many respects they are also bildungsromans, coming of age novels. The stories are predominantly set in Hogwarts, a British boarding school for wizards, where the curriculum includes the use of magic. In this sense they are "in a direct line of descent from Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days and other Victorian and Edwardian novels of British public school life".[35] They are also, in the words of Stephen King, "shrewd mystery tales",[36] and each book is constructed in the manner of a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery adventure; the books leave a number of clues hidden in the narrative, while the characters pursue a number of suspects through various exotic locations, leading to a twist ending that often reverses what the characters had been led to believe. The stories are told from a third person limited point of view; with very few exceptions (such as the opening chapters of Philosopher's Stone and Deathly Hallows and the first two chapters of Half-Blood Prince), the reader learns the secrets of the story when Harry does. The thoughts and plans of other characters, even central ones such as Hermione and Ron, are kept hidden until revealed to Harry.
The books tend to follow a very strict formula. Set over the course of consecutive years, they each begin with Harry at home with the Dursleys in the Muggle world, enduring their ill treatment. Subsequently, Harry goes to a specific magical location (Diagon Alley, the Weasleys' residence or Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place) for a period before beginning school, which he commences by boarding the school train at Platform 9¾. Once at school, new or redefined characters take shape, and Harry overcomes new everyday school issues, such as difficult essays, awkward crushes, and unsympathetic teachers. The stories reach their climax near or just after final exams, when Harry confronts either Voldemort or one of his Death Eaters. In the aftermath, he learns important lessons through exposition and discussions with Albus Dumbledore. This formula was completely broken in the final novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, in which Harry and his friends spend most of their time away from Hogwarts, and only return there to face Voldemort at the climax.

Themes
See also: Politics of Harry Potter
According to Rowling, a major theme in the series is the theme of death. She says:[37]
“
My books are largely about death. They open with the death of Harry's parents. There is Voldemort's obsession with conquering death and his quest for immortality at any price, the goal of anyone with magic. I so understand why Voldemort wants to conquer death. We're all frightened of it.
”
Rowling has stated that the books comprise "a prolonged argument for tolerance, a prolonged plea for an end to bigotry" and that also pass on a message to "question authority and… not assume that the establishment or the press tells you all of the truth".[38][39]
While the books could be said to comprise many other themes, such as power/abuse of power, love, prejudice, and choice, they are, as J.K. Rowling states, "deeply entrenched in the whole plot"; the writer prefers to let themes "grow organically", rather than sitting down and consciously attempting to impart such ideas to her readers.[40] Along the same lines is the ever-present theme of adolescence, in whose depiction Rowling has been purposeful in acknowledging her characters' sexualities and not leaving Harry, as she put it, "stuck in a state of permanent pre-pubescence".[41]
Rowling said that, to her, the moral significance of the tales seems "blindingly obvious." The key for her was the choice between what is right and what is easy, "because that, that is how tyranny is started, with people being apathetic and taking the easy route and suddenly finding themselves in deep trouble."[42]