1997. Rating: 8 - 9When I first heard about the Harry Potter series, I did what I normally tend to do when confronted with any new fad: I devoutly ignored it. I started taking notice when I discovered that more adults were reading it than kids. I took more notice when some of my own adult friends became suddenly addicted to it, including those working 60 hour (or longer) work weeks. Finally, without a word one evening, a friend walked over to me and handed me Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone, the first book ("Year One") in the series. I read nearly half the book in my first sitting. I didn't finish it then because I ran out of time. Harry Potter turned author Jo Rowling into a true rags-to-riches story: single mother living in Scotland, just barely scraping by, decides to write a fantasy story to tell to her child. Only it turned out to be a fantasy the rest of the world has gotten caught up in...including me. Harry is an 11-year-old boy living with his aunt and uncle and cousin, the Dursleys, on stodgy Privet Drive. The Dursleys are not only an ordinary family, they go out of their way to be ordinary. They hate Harry, and also go out of their way to demonstrate their true feelings for him at every opportunity. The only problem is that Harry isn't normal (a large reason, in fact, why the Dursleys hate him so much). In fact, he's a born wizard. It seems that Harry's parents were wizards themselves, but murdered by an evil wizard named Voldemort. Up until that time Voldemort led a large following of other dark wizards who chained the rest of the magical community in fear and were poised to conquer it. But when he tried to kill Harry, for some reason his own magic sprung back at him and Voldemort vanished. Nobody knew why, or even if the Dark Lord was still alive. But the attack left Harry with both the Dursleys and a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead. The fun begins when Harry gets an invitation to start his first year at Hogwarts, the premiere school for wizards...and I'll stop there as far as the storytelling goes because there's simply too much I could spoil. Suffice it to say that Harry is in for a lot more than he thinks, as is the reader. Nothing in the wizarding world or the storylines are what they appear, and from the very beginning the book is a conundrum of puzzles and backplots and hidden clues scattered throughout the text which grow more complicated even as they seem to be unwound at the end. For some readers, the first part of Sorceror's Stone may go slowly, or seem too childish, but it does get much better as the book progresses--hence the split rating. To others it may be simply addictive. And while I have read better convoluted fantasy series (Farmer's Riverworld, Eddings' Belgariad, and Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber all come to mind), it's been a long time since I had this much fun reading a fantasy series. And, as you'll read in the reviews of the next two books which have been published thus far, each book only gets better as the series progresses. Not for nothing is this the first time I've ever seen every book in a series on the New York Times bestseller list all at once. At the very least they always leave me wanting to play a smashing game of Quidditch--if only I knew how to fly a broomstick! |