Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Book 5) (Hardcover)

28 hours after it began I have just reached the end of the Order of the Phoenix (I spread that out over 3 weeks, I couldn't quite manage one sitting!). Stephen Fry is truly amazing providing significanlty differnt voices for each of the many characters contained within the book. For me Fry is Hagrid! It is easy to get swept up in his telling of the tale, its almost addictive, you may find yourself having listned to 3 cds in a row, and at 75 minutes per CD this is no mean feat!

Even if you have read the books (and in this case I had) go back to the beginning and buy his reading of the Philosophers Stone. Lie in bed at night, turn the lights out and enter the world of Harry Potter through a different door...

He has been miserable ever since school broke up, with worry over You-Know-Who's return at
the end of the fourth book. He's also missing his friends, Ron and Hermione, who have been
sending him cryptic letters full of hints at secrets they can't or won't reveal.

Then to top it all, someone wants Harry dead and has sent Dementors after him, magical
creatures that suck the happiness from a person leaving them only despair and madness. Harry
has to use magic to get rid of the creatures, (in front of his cousin Dudley) but then he
gets in trouble with the Ministry of Magic for using magic outside of school and in front
of a Muggle too!

Harry thinks that things can't surely get any worse, but he would be wrong...

Oh, I loved this book. It was a darker book than the other four, but I still enjoyed it.
Here was a Harry who was getting so fed up at everything the world had been throwing at
him for the past four years and he snapped. I'm not surprised at all, and he still remained
sympathetic, even though at times his temper flared so often it was a wonder he had any
friends left!

You bristle at all the unfairness heaped upon him, especially by Professor Snape and

Professor Dolores Umbridge (the new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher), who was
appointed by the Ministry and she wasn't a favourite with the staff either.

Not only has Harry to take all this abuse from his teachers, it's his O.W.L. year (Ordinary
Wizarding Levels), he suffers horrible nightmares and visions of his friends' deaths and the
newspapers are hinting that he has gone mad and is unstable. Maybe a stay at St. Mungo's
Hospital for Magical Maladies may be in order?

We discover a few new characters in the book, as well as some secrets from old ones, which
keeps the suspense going. Although the overall tone of the book is dark, there are some
welcome moments of comic relief.

Is it a good book? Put it this way, the book is over 700 pages long and I read it in one
day. I just had to keep reading to find out what was going to happen next. Nothing on
television was as interesting as finishing the book that night!

I'm eagerly looking forward to the next installment of Harry's adventures!

Reviewed by Annette Gisby, author of Drowning Rapunzel and Shadows of the Rose.

And they'd be right. Because this is a more mature, more serious, more political book than the previous volumes in the series. The problem is that people don't like to recognize the fact that books are political. Especially children's books. Many adults are absolutely desperate to read their favourite kid's classics as fluffy, cutesy, comforting works, which have no engagement with their "real" world. So when a text like this comes along, which mixes contemporary satire with fantastic and magical elements, they become slightly uncomfortable.

The problem for this type of reader is that it cannot be denied that this book deals with some highly contentious current issues. Most obviously, it's a satire on government regulation of secondary education. But it also has some serious things to say about action and appeasement, about truth, narrative and the press and, above all, about cultural imperialism.

For example: the house elf plot. In book four this seemed to fizzle out into acquiescence in the "naturalness" of their oppression. But in book five it becomes the lynchpin of an impassioned argument for respecting difference. The central image of the novel (cleverly used by Bloomsbury on the back cover) is the statue at the Ministry of Magic - look out for Rowling's rather wonderful description of Harry's reaction when he first sees it. From a distance, it looks great, but closer to, Harry is able to see all of its weaknesses as a representation of the different magical beings. Measuring the extent to which it falls short of his own personal experiences of other "races", Harry gains an insight into the ideological work which the statue performs. Art, in this novel, is political. It's a real "Tom Brown" moment, - the fact that Harry's adventures have taken him outside of the normal confines of the wizarding world enables him to achieve an important insight into the workings of inequality.

Similarly, there are other elements which one wouldn't expect to find in a fluffy children's novel - in particular, Rowling's trademark treatment of pain. Few children's authors can write about the suffering created by death and loss in children's lives with such pathos. But here we also have a darker side of pain, the operations of torture and sadism in the actions of both Umbridge and Belletrix. Rowling manages to achieve the impossible, dealing with such subjects in a manner suitable to the youth of her readership, while maintaining a sense of their deeply disturbing nature. And while the much-hyped death of the "major character" is understated, Rowling uses it to ground Dumbledore's extraordinary view, which could come straight out of Dickens's Christmas books: that it is suffering which acts as the ground of humanity.