Review Detail

Reader reviewed by No-chan

Millions of young children, teenagers, and adults have enjoyed the Harry Potter series, ever since it first came out. I enjoyed it myself, when I got the first book, around the time it appeared.

Before I go any further, I must admit, I love the first four books. They're excellent reading material - there's plenty of adventure, humor, and good, real life situations. There was rarely a character I really disliked - in the case of characters such as Umbridge, you HATED them, but there was an in-character reason for it. The setting was excellent - it didn't seem fake, and still doesn't, even now that I'm older. I can still close my eyes and imagine that somewhere in Britain, if you walk through the right barrier in King's Cross station, you'll be able to board a scarlet steam engine and ride off to a world filled with magic.

The plot is, yes, cliche - amazing good wizard vs. amazing bad wizard. There is no half-way points between good and evil - you're either on Harry's side, or on Voldemort's. The characters, as I stated, started out good, but...

Unfortunately, after the fourth book, things go heavily downhill.

The first thing that's wrong, is that younger kids are no longer the target audience. In fact, you probably want to wait a few years if you're going to read these books to younger children - the things that happen in earlier books are easy to understand, but after the fourth, things get way too complicated for a younger child to understand. I don't think it was ever a smart idea to completely change the target audience right in the middle of the series. This was okay in the beginning, since the series did take a few years to fully come out, but it's bad when you want to read the whole thing, start to finish, to a younger child, or you are a younger child and want to read it now.

Next, the characters start getting less fun, and more irritating. Harry, especially, is almost continuously whiny and mean, and it simply amazes me, how bad he can treat some people at times (especially people who are his friends, number one being Hagrid!).

Another thing that was a bad mistake was the sudden change of genre. First, it starts off as fantasy-adventure. The fourth book kind of starts swerving there, but it's okay, because, hey, there's a dance. Everyone gets a little sappy when there's a prom coming up. By the time I got to the sixth book, I was gagging at all the romance - that's NOT what I started reading the books for! I understood that the characters were teenagers and their interests were changing, and hormones were starting to go into overdrive, but it didn't have to become such a main point.

The books become filled with cliches around the sixth book. I was able to tell anyone who wanted to listen how the entire next two books would go as soon as I read the title of the sixth book - no one believed me, but I was completely right. Sure, to some extent, you're always able to tell what's going to happen to the hero/s. But in the Harry Potter series, it was taken to a new extreme - nothing was, or is, much of a surprise.

When you get to the fifth book, there's much more dialog between characters - okay, most of the time, it's more of a monologue. Where other books excel at characters making wise comments about life, Harry Potter fails at it completely.

By the time I finished the series, I was so happy to finally be done, and I promised myself, I would never read the sixth or seventh book ever again, because they disappointed me so much. Harry became, quite quickly, a carbon copy of all the cliche heroes that no one really likes. Suffice it to say, I am embarrassed to admit I still have the last two books in my room.

The series is an amazing disappointment, and it's better off left entirely alone, because even if you like the first couple of books, like I did, you'll want to finish the series, and you'll find out that nothing amazing happens, there are no surprising twists.

So, my advice is, leave the series completely alone. You might be made fun of for never having read the series, but it's a better fate than being sorely disappointed by something that started out so good, but ended so badly.