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4 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
Why I Hate Harry Potter, 17 Jan 2000
Harry Potter is everywhere lately, featured on the cover of Time (but not as man of the year yet), making the rounds of the TV talk shows (in the guise of the author J.K. Rowling), and holding the top three slots on the NY Times Bestseller List. He's making headlines as both the savior of literacy and the spawn of Satan. But what's lost in this all this noise is the fact that, when all is said and done, Harry Potter is boring. He's popular the way Big Macs are popular; it's easy to sell something bland and formulaic....The second problem is the gross simplicity of the plot and characters. Magic works in these novels the same way Waylon Jennings' singing worked in the TV show The Dukes of Hazard. Whenever Bo, Luke and Daisy got into a pickle they couldn't get out of, the show would cut to Waylon Jennings singing yet another variation of "Good Ol' Boys" and the problem would be miraculously solved. Logic, character development, consistency even within the parameters of the story, were always ignored. Harry has the same luck. Whenever he's in a jam or things aren't going well, he manages to find some long lost spell or some arcane rule of quidditch to make everything all right. Character development is, of course, out of the question. Just like the rule requiring every Big Mac around the world to taste equally bland, every character in the Potter books is either good or bad from start to finish. Harry runs the emotional gamut from A to A and back again. The villains twirl their mustaches and cackle like an army of Snidely Whiplashes. The characters in the Potter books are all gross cartoon exaggerations; but as Homer Simpson has proven, even cartoon characters can have hearts. Too bad Harry hasn't learned that. The real trouble with Harry is that his oversized ego and the hype all around him is crowding everybody else out of the field of new children's books. He's like the George W. Bush of children's literature. If you want to read books that don't insult the intelligence of your inner child try Holes by Louis Sachar, or The View from Saturday by E. L. Konigsburg. Jules Feiffer has two amazing novels: A Barrel of Laughs, a Vale of Tears and The Man in the Ceiling. Or if you need something British try The Daydreamer by Ian McEwan. Like Harry, these books were all written in the last five or six years; and like Harry, they all have magic of one kind or another. But unlike Harry, these books are also fresh and intelligent....
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3 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Very Disappointing, 17 Jul 1999
By A Customer
The first book was Great. The second book was fair. This book is totally aweful!!! I can't believe people enjoyed it and did not realize how wattered down her stories have become. I think Rowling was wrong to try and stretch the story thin and it has been reflected in the poor quality of the sequeals. Buyer beware!!!
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4 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
HAIRY POOTER AND THE KAMIKAZE POISONER, 8 Nov 2000
Initially I gave this one star, but my magnanimity got the better of me. Two out of five? As a story, I think it is the best of the three so far - but the price we pay is getting higher. I know one father who decided midway to stop reading this as his childrens' bedtime story. So, get your party-poopers ready, what is the problem?Well, I still like the plot, athough it is three in a row for the paint-by-numbers formula. It works. Practice makes perfect, and the writing is getting better, the descriptions are more vivid. The pace is breathless in places. And I admit to another laugh-out-loud moment (two in three books!), when Malfoy got mud in his eye. But now I am wondering which genre these books really belong to. Narnia (CS Lewis), Middlearth (JRR Tolkien), and Earthsea (UK LeGuin) fantasy? Not quite. Rowling does not bother to create a separate, consistent world to play in - or she cannot do it. But the horror element seems to grow as one book leads to another. Far from the magic being fun, it all gets colder and deadlier as time goes by. The dark is rising, and there are only cardboard cutout heroes to dispel it. Rowling does not love her 'good' characters, and they remain wishy-washy compared to the exciting evildoers. The heroes need all the dumb luck that they can get to escape the clutches of the Evil One. She does not even create her own monsters. The grey Dementors (demonic soul destroyers) use fear as their weapon, and are taken from the Black Riders in the Lord of the Rings. Just a change of shade, like a photocopier nearly out of toner. The other monsters are taken from Dungeons and Dragons books. The dialogue has been seen before in soap operas - the ones where the actors get their lines and think, 'Script weak - shout. Script very weak - shout louder'. As the scale of values slides towards the Dark Side Harry and co. pull the 'Simpliciter absurdo pifflewiffle' spells out of the bag to survive. The adults dispense advice which veers between the obscure and the obtuse. The woman teaching the third form Divination is a tea-leaf reading quack - until she is possessed by an evil spirit, and gives a real dark prophecy for Harry's personal unbenefit. In fact, now I broach the subject, possession is a common theme through all three books. First book a teacher, next book a pupil, now an army of soul-suckers and a medium. So do you feel that it is all as harmless as it might seem?
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3 of 73 people found the following review helpful:
Completely irrealistic, 9 Jul 2005
I find that reading this book was a complete waste of time, don't get me wrong I prefer fantasy over all other genres.
The major problem with this book is Harry himself. I just mean to say how is it possible that a kid(who suffers from constant abuse from his aunt, uncle and his cousin AND who doesn't have any friends) form such an open, heroic, kind and helpful personality?
I don't believe this book could ever remotly be considered the equal of such great books as "The Lord of the Rings", the "Legends" trilogy, or any book by Fritz Leiber or Jack Vance.
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0 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
I'd rather be a prisoner in Azkhaban than read another Potter book, 3 April 2008
Having watched the films and enjoyed them, I spoke to my fiancée with regards to reading the books. She has read them all and suffers from what can only be described as 'pottermania'. Knowing me as well as she does, she recommended that if I was to get into the story in the book, I would be better reading "prisoner" to start with as it was probably the best written of the early books.
Armed with a lazy saturday afternoon and the phone off the hook, I sat back and read what JKR had to offer. I hasten to add, I am an avid SF/Fantasy reader and own several hundred books of the ilk, so I felt that I could seriously give it a go and get myself immersed in potterdom.
Ok, on to the book.
That evening, I finished what can possibly be described as the worst waste of time in my life. Now, I understand that the story is for kids, I'm not knocking that fact and the way that JKR writes, it is as if a kid had written it. I found I couldn't get to grips with her storytelling style. The language used was basic and how adults could be drawn into such a world, defies belief. It just goes to show that even if you aren't a good writer, you could still become a millionaire on the back of media promotion and the hype that surrounds a new book.
If I were you, I would stick to the films, they at least are enjoyable to watch, contain the interesting bits of the books and thankfully are only 2 hours out of your life wasted!
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