Rating: WORTHY!
This novel is my favorite of all the seven in this series, but I still had issues with it, including boredom from reading parts that I had found only passable the first time through. The biggest one is what a jerk both Harry and Dumbledore are, Dumbledore for treating Harry like crap and Harry for being such a fly-off-the-handle sore-head.
The novel starts with Harry at "home" with the ridiculous caricatured aunt, uncle, and Dudley. This is the one where Harry treats Dudley like crap, ragging on him and taunting him. In some ways it's understandable given the way he's been treated, but frankly it makes Harry look like a jerk and a bully.
In the first chapter, amusingly titled "Dudley Demented" and on the way home one evening, they encounter the dementors in an alley. This is handled better in the movie, where the encounter occurs in a claustrophobic pedestrian underpass, than in the novel, where it's in an alley. I prefer the way Harry deals with the second dementor, too, sweeping his wand so his patronus charges the length of the tunnel to rescue Dudley.
In the book, Harry actually talks to it, telling it to go get the dementor, and it obeys him, which is intriguing. The patronus isn't really talked about at all in the books - not in any detail regarding what it is or whence it really comes, but this suggests that it actually is an intelligent life form, which begs a whole host of questions (half a host I find to be entirely insufficient on most occasions). I mean, why is the patronus not the wizard's magical familiar instead of an owl or a toad or cat? Once again it seems Rowling's world is rather lacking substance here.
The really interesting thing though, is that the wizard who was supposed to be shadowing Harry (unknown to Harry himself at the time) was Mundungus, who took off after a criminal deal, deserting his post. There are two major issues with this. The first is that given how criminally useless "Dung" is here, why, oh why is he picked to be one of the six Harry impersonators in volume seven? It makes no sense at all except to kill off yet another person in Harry's life, which Rowling has been resolutely undertaking since volume one!
The other issue is one I've raised before and I'm sure I'll raise again: why would Dung even care about a bunch of "cauldrons that fell off the back of a broom"? He's a magician. He can magic into place anything he wants. Why would he be a criminal?
It makes no sense at all except that Rowling is still making the same errors here as she has made in every volume since the first: she's trying to create a magical world, but is making it exactly like our own world with the sole exception of the magic - and the level of stupid. This is nonsensical when you think about it, so most people choose not to - as do I when I want to enjoy the stories, but when you do give it some thought, you realize how wrong it all is from the perspective of writing an intelligent novel.
Harry arrives home and immediately gets his letter from the ministry telling him that he's expelled from Hogwarts because of his illegal use of under-age magic. This is without trial, and without even an investigation, and in complete contradiction of some other such events. It's inconsistent. Guilt is presumed, not innocence until guilt is proven. Who would even want to live under a totalitarian system like that? How could they enforce it in a magical world?
This "Big Brother" portrayal of the ministry is one which Rowling avails herself of more than once in this book, and it's also shown in the movie by the huge image of Cornelius Fudge, the minister of Magic, looking down ominously on everyone in the main hall of the ministry when Harry goes in for his trial.
The problem here is that it shows the witch and wizard community once again to be bastards and morons. There was no investigation of Harry, much less a trial, and he's been expelled? People might try to argue that this is something new, brought on by the suspicion and paranoia arising from Harry's revelation that Voldemort was back in the previous volume, but it's merely a continuance of the stupidity, ignorance and paranoia that has been a marked trait of witches and wizards throughout the series.
The escorting of Harry to Grimmauld Place is an unnecessary preview of the escape depicted in volume seven. Harry has been wandering around his neighborhood for two months and no one has bothered him at all, yet it's suddenly thought necessary to have an escort of aurors and senior wizards and take a circuitous route to Sirius's London home, now HQ for the Order of the Phoenix (about which Hermione seems to know little despite her light reading)?
I don't really get the shouting portrait of Sirius's grandmother, or whoever she was. So the sticking charm couldn't be undone (not even by the greatest wizard ever?!), then why not try some spells on it - such as bombarda or scourgify? Or muffliato? Or just get some noise-dampening fabric, add a dampening spell to it, and stick it permanently to the picture? No reason except that Rowling chose not to, thereby making the wizards and witches there look inept and clueless.
Sirius is chomping at the bit, feeling useless and desperate to get involved, which is Rowling's way of setting him up for his death which Harry alone causes and is responsible for due to his stupidity, hot temper, and propensity for precipitous action. The problem is that Sirius could have done all kinds of things. He could have been out killing off death eaters, for example. So what if the bad guys know he's an animagus? How are they going to tell which black dog he is out of all the black dogs out there?
He could have been looking for horcruxes. He could have gone to talk to the giants with or without Hagrid the clown. He could have been spying on the death eaters using Harry's cloak of invisibility. He could have been recruiting people to the cause. He could have been boning-up on advanced magic to make himself a much better magician and much less of a victim waiting to happen. There were scores of things he could have done, but chose not to. I don't want to hear his self-obsessed whining.
Dumbledore's colossal failure with Harry is blatantly obvious here. All he - or anyone at Grimmauld Place - had to do was tell Harry that Voldemort could read his mind and this was why he was being kept out of the loop, but not a single one of these dipshits has the smarts to say this one simple thing to him. The inability of people to say simple things to one another - to communicate - is rife in this series and is such a contrived method of plotting that it's actually plodding and amateur.
Dumbledore is a complete jerk, as his atrocious behavior towards Harry at his trial demonstrates handsomely. Dumbledore could have brought Harry to Grimmauld place and started his occlumency training at any time after school was out (as could Sirius), but he stupidly left it to the person Harry hated most, who also hates Harry the most, to do this when he returns to Hogwarts. How brain-dead dumb(ledore) can you get? it;s right there in the name. All bluster and dumb as a door.
When he gets to school, instead of keeping his head down and working on learning how to be the best wizard he can so he can face the evil that's out there, Harry once again proves himself to be an idiot, a slacker, and a loser. This is how he gets detention with the sadist Dolores Umbridge. Harry could have fixed this accusation of his lying about Voldemort's return by suggesting he be tested with veritaserum in front of the whole school, but he's too dumb to think of it, as evidently, is the entire magical community. They could have taken a time-turner and gone back to the graveyard to spy on events, but they're too profoundly stupid to think of that, too.
Instead he mouths-off in class and gets detention with Umbridge where she literally tortures him, and then he's too stupid to complain and get her thrown out of the school! No one in this entire series is as stupid as The Chosen One! Even Hermione fails him by refusing to report this torture. She could have had Umbridge thrown out of the school, but no.
Umbridge's poor teaching results in "Dumbledore's Army", but the sorry thing is that not a single one of the Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers ever actually taught any defense against anything. The closest we came was with Lockhart's dueling club, which actually didn't teach anything during its short life.
Harry's blind stupidity gets him into trouble again when he shows what a lousy and stupid student he is and makes no effort whatsoever at occlumency. Why this was not lesson one, day one, in the first year of school is a mystery, but let's face it, Hogwarts truly was a really lousy school and the teachers utterly clueless.
Instead of dealing with Umbridge's insanity, Dumbledore runs away, leaving the kids completely abandoned. Harry, because of his habit of sticking his nose into other people's private business, is thrown out of Snape's private occlumency classes, and then outright lies about it to Hermione. This results directly in him effectively murdering his own godfather by failing to grasp that Voldemort has pulled one over on him. He rushes off to the ministry without telling anyone in authority, necessitating a rescue by the Order, and Sirius's death. Harry failed in a second way to prevent this death, too, as we shall see.
I really loved the fight in the ministry between the Death eaters and Harry's gang, but looked at from a dispassionate point of view, it really was the most ridiculous and pathetic piece of writing. There are what, twenty Death Eaters to six fifth year students. The Death Eaters have nothing to lose. They supposedly have no qualms about killing people - as we are repeatedly told - yet not one of them hits any of the six with an avada kadavra spell! Instead they're reduced to doing ridiculous joke spells such as first years learn!
The Death Eaters had the element of surprise. All they had to do was hit the students with five avadas, a petrificus on Harry, and an accio orb, and they were done, yet there's this asinine chase through the ministry, and the absurd thing is that the students are winning. Not one of them gets seriously hurt.
Despite the fact that they repeatedly win duels with the Death Eaters, never once does Harry's team even take their wands. Had they broken the wands immediately after stunning the death Eaters, and hit them with multiple follow-up curses to really put them out of the game, they would not have left the order members so many of them to fight, all armed with pristine wands. Again, Harry's defense against the dark arts failed. But of course Rowling could not write this realistically because all six of the students would have died and there would never have been any million-selling sequels!
The saddest thing about this volume was that it all centered on a useless prophecy about Harry. The prophecy was, like all prophecies, Biblical, fictional or whatever, completely void of utility and pathetic. It gave nothing to anyone. If it had been destroyed as soon as it was realized that Voldemort sought it, the problem would have been averted - but of course there would have been no story, just as with the Philosopher's stone. Had Dumbledore told Harry this is what Voldemort was after and warned him not to go anywhere near it, the crisis would have been averted, but of course there would have been no story.
The rule that Harry was the only one who could get it made no sense. What did that mean - he was the only one who could hear it? Who could lift it off the shelf? Who could carry it away? Who could understand it? It seems like the only one of these rules that applied was physically lifting it off the shelf. Clearly he could have given it to the Death Eaters once he took it off the shelf. Even had Voldemort heard it, it would have made no difference, so putrid a prophecy was it - like all so-called prophecies. He was out to kill Harry anyway, so it made no difference to anything.
This book had the most pathetic plot ever! And still Rowling made a best seller of it - or rather, her desperate readers did. despite all the problems I had with it, I still enjoyed reading it, especially the battle at the end. I love that kind of thing, but I must admit even when I read this the first time I was rather disappointed in the execution of it.
