Born of Water by Autumn M Birt

Rating: WARTY!

This was this author's self-published debut from 2012, and as such it's not awfully bad, but I could not get along with it at all, partly because the writing felt young for the age range it was supposedly aimed at. There were other reason too, which I shall go into. I can empathize, because that's about when I started self-publishing, but I have to judge a book by its content, not how much I might empathize with the author!

This is very much trope from start to - well finish, I assume, but I DNF'd this at just shy of a third in, so I can't comment on the last two-thirds, nor can I commend it based on my reading. I was offered no reason to believe the last two-thirds would be any different from the first third - otherwise I might have been tempted to read on.

The trope approach covered everything from the way the story was written, to the characters, to the romance, to the magic employed. The magic was the usual tedious 'four elements' plus a special additional one - which has been so done to death now that it's a joke: you know: air, earth, fire, water? Which are actually not elements. The additional one in this case was the ability to use all four which is not only rare, but also frowned upon. So more Air-Bender than anything else, and certainly nothing new.

The story is set in the trope world where an authority controls magic, and rather than appreciate something out of the ordinary, this author takes the trope path that it's anathema to exhibit 'alien magic' and carries a death sentence, so naturally (and more trope) one of the enforcers of these laws encounters someone who has this special snowflake magic and instead of turning her in, goes on the run with her and three of her friends.

That wouldn't have been so bad except that it then became a tedious case of endless fleeing; from one port to another and always running into trouble, never getting even a hint of a break. It became boring to read because every arrival at every port was essentially fraught with the same peril. Yawn!

As if that wasn't bad enough, a really poorly-written 'romance' begans stirring between Niri, the main enforcer character, and some dude who was with them, maybe named Ty? I forget. All of these charcters wre really enimently forgettable. But the romance was so slapped together and pasted on that it was pointless, and not worth reading. Instead of it seemingly arising organically, it felt like the author had forced it into being because she felt there had to be a romance - more trope. Gods forbid that there should be a leading female character in a YA novel who can get by without a male to prop her up. Yawn. I didn't like it.

The title of this novel should have warned me off it. Comparisons with Sarah Maas and Anne McCaffery should have warned me off, but I didn't listen and I paid the price of wasting my valuable time on it. That's how it goes. But at least in a couple of months I'll be through reviewing books foever, and I won't have to waste more time on a book I DNF'd by having to pen a review for it! So there's that!

Edge of Magic by Jayne Faith

Rating: WARTY!

I made it about a third the way through this before I gave up because it was turning into your usual trope YA story with a troubled protaginist and a studly, chiseled wolfman coming to her rescue. Because, as you well know, women are useless on their own, according to far too many female YA writers. As far as I read, it hadn't quite progressed to her being tearful in his manly arms, but it sure as hell was on the steep and slippery downslide to the end, which is why I quit reading it. Just once in a while! Just once in a while, it would be nice to have an authro surprise me and to read something that isn't warmed-over; that isn't shit-scared to take a different tack, you know? It almost never happens.

That's why I write. To fill that yearning gap. It makes me wonder what's wrong with people - not just the pandering lackluster authors, but the limp fucks who read this shit. Don't they ever wish for something new and original? Soemthign jsut that bit different? Maybe that's the problem - they want no difference, or just that little bit of difference. Anything else scares them, because otherwise why would they seem to be so happy with this drab and boring pap? This is likely why I will never sell anything in significant numbers because I quite literally cannto write that badly. I cannot be that uninventive or derivative.

I should have known from the off, when I read the word 'fae' in the book blurb that this wasn't for me. Any author who is too chickenshit to call 'em fairies is not for me. The character names sucked, too: Tara Knightley and Judah McMahon? Really? But I liked the idea of a thief trying to pay off a debt to an unscruptulous jerk. I liked that she wasn't all powerful. It was just that trope tryst which turned me right off, because it was so predictbale and so utterly boring. Could she not once have chosen a path that's not so oft-taken? I guess not.

On top of this Tara is a bit onf a one-note whiner. I know she's had troubles, but her constant referencing of them is tedious and depressing, especially since she seems not to really be trying very hard to dig her way out. If she had tried as much as she gripes, she'd have paid off her debt five years ago! Judah is equally trope, having hotness and wealth as his only qualities. They haven't had any contact in a decade since he left after a falling out, yet neither has moved on. It's pathetic: sad, predictable, and boring.

On top of all that, Tara is the sole breadwinner and provider for all the people who live in the house and she doesn't even get her own room, much less any gratitude or assistance from anyone to pay bills. And she has no problem with this (apart from her internal monolgue whining)! It's all too extreme.

Bright Ruined Things by Samantha Cohoe

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Errata "...and Lord Prosper like to make a good impression on First Night." Verb is wrong tense. "The last time I had seen Coco, she didn’t know how to fly. She couldn’t have gained very much experience landing one since then." This appears to be missing the words, 'a plane' in place of 'one' above.

I can understand people wanting to rip-off Shakespeare. He ripped off enough people himself, let's face it! Let me also say up front that I'm no big fan of his. I think he was derivative, plodding, and primitive in many ways, but he did have a flair for the dramatic and he did have a nice turn of phrase here and there. I have a personal ambition to see all of his plays either live or via the silver screen just because, and I'm not there yet, but I've hardly been pursuing this goal avidly. I do think though, that if you're going to attempt something like this, you owe a bit more to your reader than your average YA novel, and that was the problem here. It's very much your average YA novel which is to say, not good.

The first problem is first person which with very few exceptions, I typically detest because it's all 'me, me, me' all the time. It's limiting. It's unimaginative (especially since most every YA writer uses it), and it's tedious to read; far too self-important, and so inauthentic. I quickly grew bored with the narrator.

Loosely (very loosely) based on Shakespeare's The Tempest, which was produced over four hundred years ago, this story - which is not set in that same time period - has more in common with Cinderella than ever it does with Shakespeare! It tells the tale of Mae, the daughter of a late steward of Lord Prosper, so we're told, who is the patriarch of a magical island that produces 'aether' - an energy source that's sold on to others elsewhere. So essentially, Prosper is a sort of oil baron, but his golden goose seems to be failing and Mae, who is pretty much an outcast from the Prosper family, especially now she's turned eighteen and expects to have to leave the island, is determined to find out why.

The most annoying thing about Mae is that she's such a limp character. She has no internal engine herself and seems quite willing to be buffeted along by everyone else's energy rather than her own. We're told she longs to remain on the island and fears being expelled because she isn't family, but we're given no reason whatsoever why she should have no interest in exploring the world, or why she should have any loyalty to the family that treats her so shabbily. It makes her seem boring and one-dimensional. Also, she's so changeable as to be a blur rather than a well-defined and strong female character. I didn't like her at all. As I find quite often these novels, I much preferred one of the other characters - a woman named Coco.

Worse, we're immediately plunged into a tediously trope YA love triangle involving Mae and two grandsons of Prosper: Ivo, the clichéd bad boy, and Miles, the clichéd sweet guy. That made me yawn the instant it was presented, because it is so unimaginative and it has been done to death in countless YA stories before this one. I guess I should be thankful I didn't have to read about anyone's "bicep" (yes in the singular - this is YA after all!), or about gold flecks in one of the guys' eyes. But then I DNF'd this at 25%, so maybe those 'classic' descriptions came later.

I didn't finish this, but it seemed to me that Miles could well turn out to be the bad guy and Ivo the good one in the end. I could quite easily be completely wrong about that. It also occurred to me that Mae could well be one of the Prosper family herself when all's said and done, through some shenanigans in the past. Miranda, in the original, was Prospero's daughter after all, in the tradition of the Italian commedia dell'arte. It was that kind of a YA novel anyway, but I had so lost interest in any of these characters that I couldn't even be bothered to skip to the end to find out!

All this despite being initially intrigued by the book description. Taking a page from the excellent 1995 movie Richard III, this novel is set in the twenties, although apart from a airplane flying to the island at one point, it could have been set at any time. There was no twenties vibe to it at all, and the only reason I really 'got' that it was the twenties was through a gratuitous mention of Bessie Coleman (misspelled as 'Bessy' in this novel), who was a black pilot in the early twenties, before she died, of course in a plane crash.

Going with The Tempest was an interesting and ambitious aim, but it was sadly let down by the YA writing. I read things like, "Coco would help me get out of marrying Ivo, but not because the idea was unthinkable, or awful, or absurd. Because it wasn’t what I wanted. And that wasn’t good enough at all." I'm sorry, but from what Mae has said earlier, that was exactly it! And these sentences would read better were they conjoined with some punctuation, such as a semi-colon and a comma.

I didn't get the point of the author using correct grammar in some places and poor punctuation in others, but this was an advance review copy so hopefully the errors and nonsensical writing will be corrected before the final version gets loose. I also encountered some other examples of problematic writing, such as:

"I suppose she has her reasons," I said. "He runs the second-biggest island. Rex is his family’s only magician. It’s what everyone wants her to do."

And yet Mae has a problem with what others want her to do? How hypocritical.

I read, "If the solution were as simple as telling Grandfather, don’t you think Apollonia would have done it already?" No, I don't, because this is a YA novel and rather than do the sensible, obvious thing and tell important things to people who need to know them, which is what real people do, everyone is hoarding secrets here, which is what fictional YA people routinely do. Again, it's unrealistic, and it creates palpably fake tension. A wiser writer would have found ways to add mystery and intrigue without having the main characters do such patently dumb things, and make such juvenile and brain-dead decisions.

Typically for YA, this novel is obsessed with looks: "There were some people who said Apollonia wasn’t beautiful." Who cares if the 'wicked step-sister' is beautiful or not? It has no bearing on the story, but it does reveal volumes about Mae's shallow and nauseating character. It's really rather pathetic. Also, it demeans Mae to have her so focused on such shallow traits, without at the very least augmenting them with something deeper and more meaningful. It betrays the main character and makes her just as vacuous, and lacking in smarts and integrity. It gives her just as little appeal as everyone else who she herself criticizes!

All in all I cannot commend this as a worthy read because it has far too much trope, and far too many faults.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling

Rating: WORTHY!

This tome (or even tomb) is the last of the series of course, and finally brings the much-awaited confrontation between Tom, Dick, and Harry - except there's no Dick. What happened to him? No one knows! So it's just Tom Riddle and Harry Potter, but it takes hundreds of pages before we actually get there. For me it's between this and volume five as to which is my favorite of the whole series. The part I like the most is the "road trip" where the three main characters go on the run, camping out in the wilds, enduring a horrible winter, alone and almost rudderless, as they try to figure out where the horcruxes are, and how to get them and destroy them.

The story is quite gripping, and very seductive. The death toll rises rather disturbingly right after we begin with the seven Harry Potters flying out of Privet Drive. Six of his friends and acquaintances drink poly-juice potion so they look like Harry, of course, but why Mundungus Fletcher was included is a complete mystery since he's totally unreliable. How he ever got into the order is an equal mystery. There was no reason that it had to be specifically seven people, so clearly it was done for no other reason than to kill off Mad-Eye Moody. And this volume is all about sevens, isn't it?! Seven Harrys. Seven horcruxes. Seven important deaths: Mad-Eye, Hedwig, Dobby, Remus, Tonks, George, and finally, Voldemort.

The seven Harry pairings were thus:

• Alastair "Mad-Eye" Moody
• Mundungus Fletcher
• Arthur Weasley
• Fred Weasley
• Bill Weasley
• Fleur de la Coeur
• Kingsley Shacklebolt
• Hermione Granger
• Nymphadora Tonks
• Ron Weasley
• Remus Lupin
• George Weasley
• Rubeus Hagrid
• Harry Potter

The seven horcrux repositories were these:

• Tom Riddle's Diary - destroyed by Harry with a basilisk fang in book 2
• Marvolo Gaunt's Ring destroyed by Dumbledore (with the sword of Gryffindor?)
• Salazar Slytherin's Locket destroyed with the sword
• Helga Hufflepuff's Goblet destroyed with a basilisk fang
• Rowena Ravenclaw's Diadem destroyed by fiend fire
• Tom Riddle's familiar: Nagini killed by Neville with the sword
• Harry Potter himself, killed by Voldemort himself

My question about the seven porters and their escorts is: Why didn't they all apparate (to the vicinity of their destination) soon as they saw the death-eaters, and then fly through the protections? This is a huge mystery. So what if they were traced - they were traced by the chasing death eaters anyway! Clearly it was all done for pure drama, but it made little sense.

Mad-Eye is inexplicably paired with Mundungus for the transition. The 'logic' here supposedly was that the death eaters would think that the most powerful wizard, Alastair Moody, would be the one protecting Harry, so why did they pair the weakest wizard with him, impersonating Harry? Why not put another really strong wizard there? It would seem that Rowling had decided to kill-off Moody and nothing was going to get in her way, so both Moody and Hedwig were lost, and Harry's ever-growing isolation was maintained at a rolling boil.

I also have to ask why there are always more death-eaters than ever there are good wizards and witches? The story makes it look like it's just a pitiful handful of folks in the order, and in the final stand at Hogwarts, and endless thousands of evil villains. Yes, in a situation like this there would always be more selfish than selfless, but by those proportions?

It seemed unrealistic because it strongly suggests that the overwhelming majority of witches and wizards were either evil or were cowards, which is nonsensical. It makes it look like there was barely another magician in the entire world who had a decent bone in their body. I don't buy that. It's a case of a writer focusing very tightly on a small handful of people and either forgetting or disregarding reality for the sake of making a point

I thought it was interesting how Rowling modeled the take-over of Voldemort's supporters on the rise of the Nazis under Hitler in the nineteen-thirties, but it's sad that she depicted people being just as blinkered and stupid now as they were back them - overlooking or ignoring or being blind to what was really going on, and being utterly unable to fight back even when they knew. Rather a lot of this series depended upon those qualities though, all designed (or ignored) for the purpose of bringing about that final confrontation at Hogwarts between Tom and Harry.

I mean seriously, when you think about it, all that needed to be done at the end was to have someone apparate behind Voldemort and perform a quick avada kadavra (another cool name - perhaps the coolest spell of all the ones Rowling invented). For that matter, why not have seven wizards apparate behind him and perform seven avadas, one to kill each of his horcruxes? If one worked on Harry, then shouldn't seven kill Voldemort? Why didn't avada work directly on the horcruxes for that matter? It was never tried.

Given how quickly and easily the protections on the Burrow fail when the ministry falls makes me wonder what the use was of the protections at all. Recall it wasn't just the ministry who provided the protections. The order did also. How did everything fail so quickly and comprehensively as soon as the ministry fell? Was the magic somehow tied to the ministry? There's no explanation given for this. Even if the fall of the ministry allowed the evil side to figure out what the protections were, that shouldn't mean they could beat them so readily, otherwise what was the point of applying them?!

If the protections were so weak, how come Voldemort couldn't defeat them that night when Harry fled Privet drive for the Tonks's residence? Exactly how did the fall of the ministry weaken the protections - especially the ones which the order applied? None of this was explained, much less made any sense at all, but it did make for a very dramatic appearance of Kingsley's patronus at the wedding, a panic, and a sudden flight for Harry, Hermione, and Ron.

Of course, if these so-called protections were of the weak-as-weasel-piss variety that was given to the philospher's stone in volume one, it's no surprise that they fell. It begs the question as to why Harry wasn't secreted at a location protected by the fidelius charm - as was 12 Grimmauld Place. Plot holes and weaknesses! Plot holes and weaknesses!

The wisdom of Dumbledore telling only Harry about the horcruxes is highly suspect. If he trusted Snape, why not have Snape seek them out? If he trusted the other members of the order, why not tell each of them? Sirius Black was on the run for two years before he died. Why didn't Dumbledore set him on the task of finding the horcruxes? Clearly it was because it had to be Harry all the way, but this was still a weakness in the story. It could just as easily have been written in a way that made it clear that Harry was the only one who could find them because of his link with Voldemort.

After a brief spell (pun intended) in Tottenham Court Road, the three travelers resort to hiding out at Sirius Black's (now Harry's) residence in Grimmauld Place, but how is this secure? Again Rowling's inability to set Snape down on one side or the other of this war is what trips the story up. If Snape knew where it was, then why did he not tell Voldemort and his followers? If Sirius's will made it clear that Harry owned the house, and the address was known, how come the Death eaters on guard outside couldn't see it? How come neither Nigellus Black nor any of the other Black family members in those portraits ever revealed the fact that the trio was in residence there? Plot holes!

After too much time passes, the three finally come-up with a plan to retrieve the locket from Dolores Umbridge which is a fun and exciting adventure and starts to build the Harry Potter rebel-on-the-run legend. The problem is that once they possess it, they can't figure out how to destroy it. They do at one point discuss the value of the basilisk fang, but they can't figure out how to get one. Plot hole! Why not have Dobby (or even Kreacher, after he became loyal to Harry) apparate into Hogwarts, grab a few fangs, and return with them? Obviously because the tension has to build, the fights have to ensue, the hopelessness has to make itself felt, before the downhill ride towards certain victory can take place, but it's still a plot hole.

This same solution applies to retrieving the goblet from Gringotts (another great name!). Why can't elves simply apparate into and out of there? Maybe the goblin magic was stronger than elf magic, but elves seem to be able to get anywhere - even "lowly" house elves - so why not there? Again because it would have robbed the story of a rather cool escapade in which the trio could be immersed - a robbery and a dramatic escape on a dragon.

Another issue is the depressing effect of carrying that locket. Why do they do this? It's not necessary. They could simply keep it in Hermione's bag, or wrap it in some sort of charm, but again it's necessary to the story to have the tension and dissension and the disruption, although why Rowling felt it necessary to split Ron away and leave Harry and Hermione together is a mystery.

At a later date Rowling suggested that she'd made a mistake in pairing Hermione with Ron. It should have been Harry and Hermione, she said, but that would have paired Ginny with Ron, which would have been completely out of the question! I think she made the right choice to do it as she did. Pairing Ginny with Harry was an enlightened choice. They simply seemed to fit, and Ginny was a very powerful witch in her own right. We saw nowhere near enough of her in the story, but keeping her romance with Harry largely out of it was a wise decision. It remains a mystery as to why Hermione would pair with Ron, but who cares, really?

Another option would, of course, have been pairing Luna and Harry since they did seem to bond. I'd like to recommend to Rowling that when she revisits the Potter world, as she inevitably must, that she follow Luna on some adventures! That said, it seems odd that the death eaters would hold Luna Lovegood hostage in volume 7. She really had no tight connection to the Harry-Hermione-Ron triumvirate. Yes, she was in the big fight in volume five, but she never really was part of the Harry entourage like the others (and even Ginny and Neville) were, so the connection/imprisonment felt a bit forced and odd to me.

I don't get the deal with Snape delivering the sword of Godric Gryffindor to Harry. How did he even know where Harry was? We were told that no one can trace those who apparate. If he knew where Harry was, then why didn't he betray him? Whose side is he on? If he's on Dumbledore's/Harry's, then why so hostile to Harry and helpful to Voldemort? If he's on Voldemort's then why so helpful to Dumbledore and Harry? None of this made sense. His loyalty to Lily certainly didn't extend to Harry as he demonstrated repeatedly. Harry was no better than James to him, and he detested James with a vengeance.

There's no explanation in the movie, but in the book we learn that Snape knows where Harry is because Nigellus overhears Hermione talking about going to the Forest of Dean, which is in Gloucestershire (pronounced Gloss-tuh-shuh). It's over forty square miles, and knowing Harry is in an area of that size doesn't remove the protective charms Harry and Hermione have been using. Now if Snape knew exactly where they were camping, then he could wait until one of them appeared outside of the charmed zone, but he doesn't have a clue where they are, and they routinely do not come out of the protection! How did he find Harry?

I don't get why Harry isn't completely honest with Griphook when they were planning the raid on the bank vault. They don't need to tell him about the horcruxes, but Harry could have promised him the sword, but when he's done with his task. He could have told him that the sword was crucial to completing the task and defeating Voledemort. In the end it didn't matter, of course, but it seemed an odd piece of writing, and made both Harry and Hermione seem much more duplicitous than they needed to be. To me this betrayed the whole "treat magical creatures as equals, not inferiors" thing which Hermione had going on.

Harry's connection to Voldemort proves to be extremely useful to him throughout this volume, keeping him abreast of what Voldemort is doing or thinking. It also reveals that the next horcrux is at Hogwarts and precipitates the final showdown. I don't get why Harry didn't seek to deprive Voldemort of the Elder Wand. I know he changed his focus back from the diversion into the hallows and onto the horcruxes, but just for the sake of depriving Voldemort and pissing him off, he could have had Dobby or Kreacher go get it as soon as he realized where it was.

It wasn't helpful at all that Dumbledore pushed him off track onto the hallows digression. It made no sense. It's like the deathly hallows was an entirely different story and it was something of a mystery to me as to why Rowling introduced it at this late stage. Obviously it was tied to the elder wand, but it seemed a bit much.

And speaking of unhelpful, Aberforth - who by then ought to have known what Harry was up to - could have been more helpful - especially when Harry and Co. were captured by snatchers. Another unhelpful character was Lady Helena. I don't get why the Grey Lady is so difficult to the point where she gives them a riddle instead of saying it's in the room of requirement. For that matter why didn't Harry simply ask the RoR to show him the location which contained the diadem?! If it responded to need, no one had a greater need than Harry right then of finding that thing!

So wouldn't Nagini have been thought the true owner of the Elder wand? It wasn't Voldemort who killed Snape, but Nagini. Voldemort must have been really stupid if he thought that he could "win it" by having someone else kill Snape. He must have been even more stupid if he thought he could win it when Snape didn't even physically possess it at the time! Once again Snape is inexplicably helpful in passing on memories to Harry after Voldemort mortally wounds him. How he doesn't immediately die remains a mystery, but then he couldn't have passed on those memories, of course!

But this is how Harry learns that he must die. I'm not sure of the point of bringing back the dead to accompany him through the forest, or how it worked the way it did - without problematic repercussions for Harry or for those he returned - his parents tell him they're with him all the way, but they have been conspicuous by their absence for the last seven years (as indeed was Sirius for the last two), not helping him at all. Nor do they help him now in any meaningful sense. He's never needed them to bolster his courage before, so in some ways it was weird, but in others, understandable.

As if to compound this dun of the dead error, Dumbledore shows up with Harry at King's Cross (another allusion to Harry as the Messiah/savior?!) after he's offered Harry no help at all for the entire last year! Again, dramatic, but senseless, as is Narcissa's sudden siding with him in the forest when she was ready duel with him during his escape from the Malfoy residence. This can be put down to her panic over the welfare of her child, but she has no reason to think Harry had anything to do with his survival.

The final battle royal(!) in which not only Fred Weasley, but also, oddly, the married couple of Remus Lupin and Nymphadora Tonks, all die is quite epic. I preferred the one in the book. Given that they had rendered the final volume into a two-parter for the movie, it was hard to understand why they changed so much. In the book, everyone gets to see Harry defeat Tom, fair and square in the dining hall. Nothing is hidden - there is no room for rumors to begin that Voldemort isn't dead. In the movie, he's robbed of this - defeating him with no witnesses, and then the body devolving into dust that blows away? What's to prevent anyone claiming he's still alive? Nothing! Bad move for the movie makers.

I want to say a final word about what is, in my view, the biggest indictment against Rowling in this whole series. Some would argue that it's the fact that she made Harry male instead of female, and it's a good argument, but it's not mine. Big publishing&Trade; would probably have made her change it to a male anyway - they made her change her name to initials (one of which she doesn't even have!). No, the problem is that we have a female writer who has created some great female characters, yet not once in the entire seven book series - 4,100 pages in the US version, 3,407 pages in the British version (which had a smaller typeface) - was there any bonding between any of the female characters.

Yes, there were females shown talking together and hanging out together, such as the Parvati sisters, and some brief interactions between Ginny and Hermione, but out of the three main female characters towards the end, Hermione, Ginny, and Luna, who fought together in volume five, not a one of them was ever shown doing anything of significance with any other female character. it was all Harry and Hermione or Harry and Ron and that was it. Shame on Rowling for denying women any bonding at all in over a million words.

These carps aside, I have to rate this series overall as a worthy read, because it does have a story to tell despite the holes and issues, and it did a monumental job of getting middle grade and YA literature back into children's minds and, more importantly (especially given the issues I raised!), hearts.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince by JK Rowling

Rating: WORTHY!

This is another Harry Potter novel that opens with no Harry Potter in sight to begin with. This is also the novel which Rowling herself felt best about in the entire series from what I've read: the one which she liked the most, and which she spent a lot more time in planning, having learned a lesson from the difficulties she had with volume four, which necessitated an extensive rewrite. I think this is conversely, my least favorite!

This time we get Bellatrix Lestrange, arguably the most powerful witch in the entire seven volume series (aside from Molly Weasley, of course!), and her kid sister Narcissa Malfoy apparating to a location close to where Severus Snape lives in a rather run-down neighborhood. Why they don't apparate somewhat closer to his house than they do is slightly mysterious, but I guess you can explain that away by their desire to remain unobserved by Muggles, but this begs the question as to why they would even care.

It's a rather bigger mystery as to why Wormtail is staying with Snape. Draco Malfoy has evidently been tasked by Voldemort with working on a cabinet hidden away in the Room of requirement. This cabinet has a twin in the Borgin and Burkes dark magic shop off Diagon Alley, which Harry encountered in Chamber of Secrets - another example of Rowling's intensive long-range planning of her seven book series. Death Eaters plan on using this to get into Hogwarts. Why? Seriously, why? We never learn.

The ostensible plan is to murder Dumbledore, but they could have done that at any time. Throughout their entire novel, Dumbledore is traveling, it would not have been hard for the death eaters to track him down and "do him", but once again we're locked into Rowling's one-year plan, so to kill him off earlier would have failed her scheme of things, but this still fails to explain why Dumbledore was considered so far advanced beyond any other wizard in his power that he was the only threat to Voldemort. I find it hard to credit that out all the witches and wizards on the planet, there was quite literally no other wizard even approaching Dumbledore in power, and who was also a good person. It beggars belief.

Evidently Draco is now a Death-Eater and getting others into Hogwarts, and killing Dumbledore, is how he will prove himself. Why get Death-Eaters in if Draco is going to kill Dumbledore? They did nothing when they arrived so what was the point? The main problem is two-fold here, from what I can see. First of all, why Draco? Snape is already there. He could let Death-Eaters in any time he wanted. If they absolutely have to use the cabinet, he could have fixed it and presumably far faster than Draco did. So why Draco? I have no idea except that once again we're writing to formula instead of to a realistic plot pace and authenticity, and so we have the adventure play out over an entire school year and employ one of Harry's rivals rather than an adult.

The second issue is: why would anyone actually want to join Voldemort? They're wizards. They can do and have anything they want, quite literally, so where is the impetus to subjugate themselves to a psychotic wizard? Voldemort's motivation is criminal, but at least he has one. He wants to dominate the Muggles, kill-off the "half-breeds" and rule the rest, but to what end? He's no better off then than he is as a plain, ordinary wizard, and he has the added headache of all that responsibility! It makes no sense, but then Voldemort didn't have to.

Voldemort doesn't need a goal since he's completely loony tunes, but you would think others do. I mean there would no doubt be other psychos who would join him because like attracts like, but this fails to explain why so many people would actually volunteer for his crusade. What would it net them that they don't have already? It's the same problem with some of the James Bond stories. Why would criminal "masterminds" spend billions to set up something which would only serve at best to recoup the billions they've had to spend? None of it makes any sense!

Harry appears when Dumbledore once again uses him in much the same way, since we've already made the comparison, that 'M' employs James Bond: as a blunt instrument to achieve his ends, but at least Bond gets the facts; Harry never does! In this case, the job is to recruit Horace Slughorn as potions master, yet we never learn why Dumbledore was so obsessed with hiring Slughorn. Yes, Slughorn had this knowledge about what Voldemort was up to way back when, but Dumbledore could just as readily have got that by doing some magic on him and reading his mind. This elaborate farce was nonsensical.

The bigger question is why didn't Dumbledore, who himself dabbled in the dark arts when he was younger, already know about horcruxes? It beggars belief to think he would be ignorant, given his history and his relationship with Tom Riddle. Besides at this point, Dumbledore already knows that Voldemort has made horcruxes. So we have this whole story built around retrieving information from a character which ultimately tells us nothing that we didn't know already. The most crucial piece of information was how many horcruxes Voldemort had made. This was the key to defeating him since every one of them evidently has to be destroyed, but Slughorn did not have that knowledge. The simple use of a time-turner would have been ideal for tracking Voldemort's actions, and identifying the horcruxes and their secret locations, yet never once is this put forward as a solution! Plot hole!

It's a bit obvious from the start that the potions book which Harry gets hold of belonged to Snape and that, therefore, he had to be the Half-Blood Prince, and who cares anyway? It's not like unraveling this "mystery" actually solved any dark problem or brought any evil-doers to book. I think this is why I disliked this book perhaps more than even Goblet of Fire (although the two are close!). It really wasn't a story like the others were, it was more like six hundred pages of exposition. And Rowling got away with it!

And what about the staff shuffle? Suddenly, Snape is now absolutely fine as the teacher of the Defense Against the Dark Arts class? Why now after sixteen years is it perfectly fine to give him the job he's most qualified for, but not at any time prior to this? Again, Rowling offers absolutely no explanation whatsoever for this. Plot hole!

Why Hermione gets so angry with Harry is a bit of a mystery, too. Yes, she has a valid concern about his use of the half Blood Prince's potion-preparing tips, but to get so bent out of shape is overkill. It's a school text book, not a dark arts book, and the tips work. Besides, how come she didn't simply come up with a spell to show who used that book over the years? She was always magically on top of things at other times, why not now? She does pull out a spell to test it for dark influences, but she never thinks about tracing its history? Again Hermione is made to look dumb.

Harry's newfound 'facility' with potions does help win him the bottle of Felix Felicis, and it's cool how he tricks Ron into thinking he got lucky in quidditch, but the fact that Harry's sudden excellence in potions trips no one's alarm bell is a complete mystery. Wouldn't McGonagle have wondered, even vaguely, how a poor student - which is, let's face it, what Harry was at best - could have risen to brilliance over the course of one summer with no practice? Once again wizards and witches are shown to be amazingly blind and stupid. And what's with Harry's "acceptable" being unacceptable for pursuing a higher education? The scoring system makes no sense!

In this volume, Dumbledore suddenly has time for Harry, but he still won't tell him what's really going on. Once again, Dumbledore is shown to be a complete a jerk - and a moron, too. So his hand is cursed - so what? Cut it off and have Madam Pomfrey regrow it healthily. This is never put forward as an option, not even to shoot it down with some magical explanation. It's merely left hanging there which again makes wizards and witches look clueless and inept and Rowling look like a bad writer. And if this is a deadly spell, why isn't it included along with the other unforgivable curses?!

We do get to see some interesting history and enjoy the pensieve once again, which I always thought was cool in the movies, although if they were a person's memory, it was completely ridiculous that we never saw the imagery from that person's PoV. This is a mistake made frequently when exploring memory, but it's really, really bad in Rowling's case. If it was person X's memory, then that memory would never show person X from a third person perspective. And what's with the idiotic Muggle clothing - the guy wears a one piece swimsuit under an overcoat? Where did he even get that idea? This merely serves to highlight how profoundly stupid and moronic the wizards and witches are in Rowling's world. It's not even funny.

We learn, during the course of these visits, that there are at least three horcruxes, two of which are already destroyed. The first was down to Harry stabbing Tom Riddle's diary with a basilisk fang in Chamber of Secrets and the second was Dumbledore's sole contribution to bringing down Voldemort. He destroyed the locket at the cost of his own life - or more accurately at the cost of his own pointless death, but he never once explains to Harry how to destroy the horcruxes, verifying yet again what a swine Dumbledore truly was. None of this tells them how many more horcruxes Voldemort has created or where they are - so how does Dumbeldore know that four remain? (There are actually five, but once again he's lying to Harry about that because he's a manipulative a jerk).

It's in this volume that Ron and Hermione finally hook up, although what she sees in him is a complete mystery. Harry also gets it on with Ginny, who's had the hots for him since volume one, according to Ron, but none of this really goes anywhere or contributes anything to this story.

Dumbledore shows what a weak wizard he is by being utterly unable to figure any way around the potion guarding the locket. He couldn't get an inferi to drink it? He couldn't magically line his alimentary canal to prevent harm, and drink it himself? Clearly Voldemort here has defeated the supposed most powerful wizard in the world. This is the price of Rowling's determination to weaken and kill off Dumbledore, but it makes him look stupid again. He has to be killed off at any price, so there you go.

One thing I never did get at the end was why the movie people changed Rowling's original story. In the book, Dumbledore freezes Harry (who is hidden under his invisibility cloak) and he literally cannot do a thing, yet the movie has him hiding one floor below the top of the tower, where he could have helped, but failed to do so. In short, the movie made Harry look like a coward and a loser, which is completely adrift from how the book had portrayed him. Go figure! I don't get why Rowling allowed them to get away with such an abusive change to her story.

This is how Harry gets to see Draco disarming Dumbledore, and thereby unknowingly taking possession of the Elder wand, before Snape comes up and carries out Dumbledore's instruction to kill him. It's also here that Harry proves himself once again to be a self-centered jerk when he abandons Ginny, who is fighting for her life, in his blind-rage pursuit of Snape. He could have donned his invisibility cloak and taken down several of the Death-Eaters, but he fled the scene, ignored the needs of his supposed friends and the Order of the Phoenix members, and ran away. Jerk.

Harry also shows how weak of a wizard he is - and this is the year after he has been teaching "defense against the dark arts" to students - as he fails to get Snape, but this isn't even the most inexplicable thing here! We have Death-Eaters in the castle, and they have a chance to wreak havoc, yet instead of firing Avada Kadavra killing curses, destroying everything in sight, and perhaps unleashing fiend fire into the school, they're using pathetic high-school level jinxes? Clearly Rowling didn't want to kill off scores of her reader's favorite characters here, but this is a massive plot hole, every bit as big as the one in Order of the Phoenix, where they previously failed to kill anyone.

These are supposed to be death eaters - feared and deadly, dangerous and remorseless, yet every time we encounter them, all they ever do is vomit up weak as weasel-piss amateur magic. Where the hell did they ever get their reputation?! I consider this a major failing on Rowling's part. I can see how she wouldn't want this kind of thing in the very earliest volumes, but these kids are now fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and yet she still offers us no more danger than she did in volume one!

So the story ends with an unnecessarily dead Dumbledore, and HRH vowing to destroy Voldemort by eradicating all his horcruxes. This, for me, was the most boring book in the series maybe in competition with Goblet, yet it still got a story told and kept my interest in following the series.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by JK Rowling

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.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by JK Rowling

Rating: WORTHY!

Surprisingly, about half the Potter books begin without Harry taking the stage immediately. This is one of them. Voldemort is now forced to live a miserable existence as some unspecified hobgoblin creature drinking Nagini's "milk" (since snakes are not mammals, one can only assume this means venom), being attended upon by Peter Pettigrew, aka Wormtail. He kills Frank Bryce, the old man who tends the grounds, and Harry sees this in a dream, but soon (and inexplicably, I might add!) forgets the details.

Usually the opening sequence is to jump to Harry (or after a digression, jump to him, and share his misery at being under the thumb of the Dursleys at 4 Privet drive, but here we quickly get to his traveling with the Weasleys to the quidditch world cup, this year between Ireland and Bulgaria. I have to say I wonder why Rowling added all these details. I'm guessing she felt secure enough at this point that she could pretty much do whatever she wanted, and this time indulged herself in a flight of fancy showing all manner of aspects of her wizard world which had hitherto been only notes in a book somewhere. This isn't the longest book in the heptalogy - it just feels like it is.

The problem with this for me was that it makes the book rather tedious and in places, downright boring. Reading the book through once isn't so bad, but when you come back to it for review purposes as I did here, and listened to seventeen audio disks, it's a bit much, even with Jim Dale's inventive and charming voice.

Established writers can get away with endless, mindless rambling unfortunately (Stephen King I'm looking at you). New writers cannot. Indeed, they're censured for it. What this book needed was a fearless editor. Hermione's ill-conceived (by Rowling) digression into saving the elves, for example, could have been omitted completely without the book suffering one iota.

The film makers chose to eliminate all mention of house elves (notably, Winky and Dobby) from this story, so we never get to see a female house elf in the movies, but that said, Rowling pursued the elf component so aggressively in this unnecessarily long novel. It was a bad idea to have Hermione start her own organization, which had the ridiculous initials SPEW. I cannot believe Hermione would ever have come up with a dumb acronym like that. It's an insult to her intelligence to suggest she would, so I didn't get Rowling's thinking here, or her apparent desire to make Hermione the butt of a joke. It detracted both from the character's intelligence and sensitivity, and from the goal she was pursuing here, and it was belittling and demeaning both.

The quidditch world cup was more understandable, but it served little purpose other than to make wizards look really stupid. The death eaters show up and for some reason, even though the decent wizards outnumber them overwhelmingly, they seem to dominate and rule the aftermath, running riot in the camp site and sending up the "Dark Lord's mark" into the sky. Poor Winky is set-up using Harry's wand, and she never recovers from it.

On the topic of wands, I don't get Harry's starkly highlighted carelessness demonstrated in this novel in his losing his wand, and later in his evident lack of care for it which is noted right before it's examined by Olivander. Contrast that with Harry's almost fetishized pining for it when it gets broken in volume seven and you'll see the inconsistency. Plot problems are rife in this series when it comes to wands, and how they work and why they're needed.

Once again at Hogwarts, there's a new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, and once again we get absolutely no explanation whatsoever for why Snape, the best qualified teacher for it, isn't given the position. Oddly, the fake Moody ends-up being the best dark Arts teacher they've had to this point! Certainly he's the only one who has actually taught them about dark arts, which is hilarious hypocritical given who he really is.

The big announcement though, is that Hogwarts will host the Triwizard Tournament - a battle of skill and wits between representative wizards from each of three wizarding schools: Beauxbatons (French for beautiful wands - and which contrary to popular view and to the movie presentation, is not a school solely for girls!), Durmstrang (a mix up of the German words for storm - sturm - and penetrated - drang), and Hogwarts (an English word meaning a pig with malignant skin growths...!).

Why Rowling chose to use German words for a Bulgarian school goes unexplained. Maybe it's because no one would be able to read буря проникнали? Why the tournament has been resurrected this year after two centuries of neglect is also a mystery, but it makes for a fun story and puts Harry in grave peril again, so what's not to like?! Harry is of course selected even though he's ineligible. How that works is a mystery. The three real candidates are Fleur Delacour (French for flower of the heart), Viktor Krum, and Cedric Diggory aka The Batman.

This not only puts Harry at risk for the tournament, but also drives a wedge between him and Ron, who inexplicably thinks that Harry is showing-off and has put his own name in the goblet. The first task, Harry learns involves dragons. Harry very kindly alerts Cedric since he assumes that both the French and Bulgarian candidates will know, but this alert serves only to make Harry look generous. It effectively benefits Cedric not at all since none of them know what they have to actually do. The big plot hole here is the fact that these fire-breathing dragons are confined behind wooden fences! Seriously? Was the editor sleeping, or was Rowling?

Harry is revealed repeatedly as a poor student throughout this series, which to me is inexplicable given how thrilled he initially was to find himself a wizard and a student at a magic school, and how much he adores the school. He's really poor at doing homework, he shows absolutely no interest whatsoever in learning anything about magical history or in talking to the ghosts to find out about their world and maybe, in turn, something about where his parents are now.

He's never shown questioning other witches and wizards, and especially not the teachers, about their lives and their powers. Actually, he's downright disrespectful to the teachers to the point of outright rudeness, as is shown when he demands from Grubbly Plank where Hagrid is at one point in this story. In short, Harry Potter is something of a jerk and a slacker.

He only shows interest in the summoning charm (accio) when he is kicked in the butt by Moody to play to his strengths. Why would he not want to learn a summoning charm for its own sake? Imagine how useful that would be! Yet he shows no interest in it until he realizes it might save his life. Likewise he shows zero interest in any other useful spells. Not that the school teaches them. It seems to me the first order of business should be to teach children the defensive and the healing spells, but we know by now how incompetent both the school faculty and its headmaster are.

The shameful incompetence of Dumbledore is highlighted quite starkly here as Rita Skeeter (in her animagus guise of a mosquito, hence her name) comes and goes from the school with complete impunity. Recall only the year before, an animagus (Sirius Black) was able to come and go as he pleased, yet Dumbledore has done the cube root of diddly squat to set up magical barriers to prevent this ever happening again. I actually agree with Malfoy that Dumbledore is the worst wizard at Hogwarts!

More than this, Skeeter is publishing all kinds of scandal about the school and Dumbledore does nothing - not even writing a letter of complaint to the newspaper! I have to say I agreed with Skeeter in her assessment of Hagrid. I never really liked him, so I am a bit biased, but she is correct in drawing attention to how ill-advised Hagrid is in bringing dangerous animals into his classes.

The Yule ball seemed to me to be another example of where Rowling lards up this story, as though she was loathe to leave out any details from her wizarding world notes. In this case, however, it wasn't one which was so far out of the way that it stuck out like a sore thumb, but it definitely could have had less acreage devoted to it. The thing here which really bothered me was Ron's formal "robes".

These robes are antiquated and they smell, yet Ron and his parents are magicians! Why can they not magic a fix? He can't make them like new? He can't remove the smell? He can't remove the embarrassing lace? His mom, who can beat Bellatrix Lestrange without breaking a sweat, can't transform an old set of school robes into formal robes? She can't transform his old robes into new robes that fit him? None of this makes any sense and is yet another example of Rowling idly and simply laying a very thin magic veneer over the real world. It's so thin it's full of holes and she makes very little attempt to have it make sense.

Rowling is obsessed with robes, as it happens. Everyone wears them even when it's not actually necessary. For example, at one point, Skeeter is described as wearing bright yellow robes whereas in the movie she wears regular clothes. Why wouldn't wizards wear regular clothes? Why would muggle clothes be such a mystery to them unless they really are profoundly stupid people?

Ron and Harry are downright jerks towards Parvati and Padma Patil, yet this is supposed to be funny. I found that a bit strange to say the least, but not as strange has the two of them not having been asked to the ball before Ron and Harry ever got around to it. Were all the boys at Hogwarts racist?! They certainly were mostly white as judged from the movie versions of the books. The worst part here though is Harry's anger management problem. He's upset over Cedric taking Cho Chang to the ball, and so once again he proves what a lousy student he is by virtually ignoring Cedric's advice to listen to the egg in the bathroom. Moron!

I don't get why, in volume 5, Harry is assigned to special ed occlumency classes, but he is never once directed to anger management, which causes him far more problems than failing to block Voldemort ever does. In fact Voldemort's failure to capitalize on his access to Harry is totally inexplicable, but let's consider occlumency. Why only Harry? It seems to me that occlumency should have been job one on day one in Defense Against the Dark Arts classes, yet it's never taught! Again, a huge hole!

At the last minute (his usual habit) Harry finally gets to the bathroom and listens to the clue under water, but he fails to find a spell to help him to breathe until Dobby comes up with the gillyweed (it's different in the movie, where it's Neville who suggests it). Why this had to be done in secret is a mystery. He should have been able to ask for it. Why Snape has no protections on his stores to prevent theft is a bigger mystery, though! Another plot hole. But once again Harry fails to follow instructions and is rewarded for it - being tied with Cedric - again.

One thing I was annoyed with in the movie was what short shrift the maze got. The book has some, dare I say it, amazing things in the maze and yet we get nothing in the movie save for Harry running around blindly. The secret to getting to the middle and back out again in a maze, is to keep one hand on one of the walls and follow that wall. It will inevitably lead you into the middle and bring you safely out. No need for Hermione's magic.

Not that her magic helped much. How the hell Harry ever got to be called a great wizard is as much of a complete mystery as to how Hermione did not. In this case though, her spell gave a direction, but no indication if that path was going to be a dead-end at some point. And none of this helps in a maze where the walls are moving, which begs the question as to how they would ever be expected to find the middle. A better spell woudl have been one that allowed them to walk through the maze walls.

We all know what happens next - the Triwizard cup is a port key and Voldemort is back! The big plot hole at the end is once again Voldemort's blindness regarding Snape, who gave veritaserum to Barty Crouch Jr. How can Voldemort even remotely trust him? But here you have it one more time - despite all these writing problems, Rowling once again hit the best-seller list and kept her readers glued.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by JK Rowling

Rating: WORTHY!

The Prisoner of Azkaban represents the point in this series where Rowling really hit her stride. The novel was - in overall general terms - smart, tight and very active, and also very readable. Having said all that, it was still replete with plot holes and problems. None of that, though, prevented it from contributing to the run-away best-seller aura that Rowling was in process of creating, which would really take off after this edition came out. Again she shows us that you can have a Swiss cheese of a novel plot-wise if you write engagingly and offer enough freshness and action to keep young minds entertained. That and the fact that kids are far less critical and less demanding than are adults about things like this.

The Harry Potter movies recognized this sea-change in ways both intentional and unintentional. There was a major shift between the first two movies which very much had the look and feel of a Home Alone movie, and the third one (and those beyond that), which were far more serious and grown-up in their attitude, and significantly darker. I don't believe that the studio planned it this way, however! It was merely a change in director.

The three main actors were also allowed to be more themselves (while still the characters they portrayed, of course!). It was like the movies had a growth spurt and were now maturing fast. The change was even more marked because, in order to actually match the action in the novels, there had to be some major and very noticeable changes on the layout of Hogwarts grounds, particularly with regard to Hagrid's residence, and the location of the whomping willow.

The first issue here was that once again Harry inadvertently does magic - without a wand, and without the requisite vocalization of two Latin words. This is can a of worms which I'll open when I discuss Harry's learning of the patronus charm. The point for now is that Harry was never censured for this!

And yes, Rowling has an out - she explains it by having the minister of magic himself take charge, and presumably quash all complaints, but the problem with the writing is that none of this showed up. In other instances, there were repercussions almost immediately, with snotty letters from the ministry popping up, yet here, he has the time to go to his room, pack his trunk, drag it downstairs, have an altercation with his uncle and leave, and not a single letter arrives! Inconsistent at best.

The next incident follows immediately afterwards. While he's sitting moping and bemoaning what's to become of him, right before the Knight Bus arrives, he sees Sirius Black. The two of them are alone. This is before Harry comes to believe that Sirius has any beef with him. Sirius is in Padfoot form, but he could have quite simply transformed and told Harry everything right there, yet he did not. Why? Because if he had, that would have been the end of the story - or start of different story (and actually one which might have been more interesting).

Rowling was writing to a formula however, and she couldn't have that up-ended, so instead we get this gigantic failure. The interesting thing is that Rowling could have written this in a different way. She could have had Harry see the dog after he got onto the bus right before it zoomed off, or she could have left the dog out altogether. This was bad writing, and her audience was reaching the age, with this volume, where they would start to notice things like that.

There were several failures of magic in this volume. The first I noticed was when Harry and the Weasleys were clunking their trunks down the stairs of the Leaky Cauldron to head out to catch the train. Why? Why not use the locomotor spell to make them levitate? Another instance is when Harry gets his new Firebolt, courtesy of Sirius, and he has a broom care kit from Hermione. At one point he's left holding the polish for his broom in his hand after McGonagall confiscates the broom to check it for curses.

Let's not even get into the question of exactly how Sirius ordered it and paid for it, because a more interesting question is, why is he manually polishing it when he has magic? Maybe he's obsessed and prefers to do this by hand, but this excuse fails to deflate the bigger question as to why there are broom care kits at all when there's magic?

It makes no sense, but once again it does fit neatly into Rowling's world, where there's all sorts of magic, and wizards appear at a loss to understand the pedestrian ways of Muggles, yet they follow these very ways themselves with great faithfulness! It's not really a magical world, you see, not at its roots. That was simultaneously Rowling's biggest failing and her greatest guarantor of commercial success.

The next issue is on the Hogwarts Express where the three main characters find themselves removed to the very back of the train where the only empty berth is to be found - empty that is except for a shabbily dressed guy who's apparently sleeping. Again this is a world of magic, so why would anyone be shabbily dressed? This goes back to what I was saying about the Weasleys being poor. Why would a magical family be poor? OTOH, why would a magical family value gold when they have magic?

At school we discover that once again the Defense Against the Dark Arts class is in need of a teacher, and once again Snape does not get appointed to the post - for no reason whatsoever. It's going to be two more volumes before he gets the job and then, suddenly, he's the DAtDA teacher and that's it - no explanation for why, at that point after god knows how long, Snape is suddenly perfect for the job whereas he never was before?! Can you say nonsensical plot hole? But it did allow Rowling to introduce a new and interesting character for each volume. In one, it was Quirrell, who was a central character. In two, it was Lockhart, who offered comic relief. In three it was a werewolf. In four it was Alastor "Mad-Eye" Moody, in five, Dolores Umbridge.

The really interesting thing about these teachers is that not a single one of them - aside from Moody (who actually wasn't Moody!) - ever taught a single thing about actual defense against the dark arts! I don't think Rowling ever said what Quirrell taught specifically, but if she did, I'm guessing it didn't amount to much. Lockhart was useless as a wizard, and in the only lesson we read about where he teaches, it's about magical creatures, not about dark arts defense, but out of all the teachers, he is in the end the only one who started the dueling club so wizards and witches could actually learn defense against the dark arts! How ironic is that?!

This magical creature study is a trend which Lupin continues when he teaches about magical creatures, not about dark arts defense. Harry does get privileged lessons about the patronus charm which is, I think the sole time any student gets a lesson about dark arts defense in the entire seven volume series - that is until Harry himself starts teaching (in secret) in volume five, but this is a complete joke, because Hermione is far more qualified in spells than ever Harry is, and Ginny is a more powerful spell caster, but the girls are given a back seat yet again by a female author of a young adult novel! Shame on Rowling!

About that patronus charm! Lupin is hesitant to teach and doubtful of Harry's ability to learn because, as he keeps repeating, this is extraordinarily advanced magic! But how is it advanced? In what way? The only 'secret' to doing magic that we ever learn in Rowling's books is that you need two things: utter a very short Latin phrase, and give a twitch of a stick! What's to learn, exactly?

Now we are told that the swish and flick are important, as is the pronunciation, but the lie to this claim is given repeatedly. Even Harry, even before he had any magical training or even knowledge that he was a wizard, could work magic without saying Latin, and without waving a stick as we saw during his trip to the zoo in volume one, and at the beginning of this volume where he inflates his uncle's sister. For neither of those events did he get a reprimand from the ministry.

In the books, we see wizards repeatedly perform magic without a wand and without vocalization, so clearly neither of those two activities is important. You can argue that pronunciation and focus are important even when the spell is spoken in your own mind, but Harry's experience denies this. It makes it look like anyone can do magic - even a non-magical person - which is what Umbridge seems to be claiming in volume seven when she's examining a Muggle witch right before HRH break into the ministry.

So I don't get what's advanced about the patronus charm. Lupin fails to actually teach Harry anything. He just tells him the almost obligatory two Latin words, reminds him to think of a good memory (but fails to tell him it has to be really good) and doesn't even say a word about how to swish and flick! When Harry fails twice in a row he's ready to give up. He offers no further advice on technique or pronunciation or anything except to urge the need to find a good memory (which begs the question as to which one Lupin uses if he's so miserable).

So I really honestly don't get any idea at all from Rowling as to how this is supposed to be advanced. We're expected to take it on faith, which is poor writing. It's odd, because she does such am amazing job of writing in other regards: such as in setting an atmosphere and in bringing scenes to life, yet when it comes to the central theme of the series - that of magic - she fails utterly to develop her world.

Harry's monkey on the back for this volume is, of course the dementors, which I openly admit are a pretty cool invention and another great name (Dudley Demented is a great chapter title in volume five!). What I don't get is how Harry's fainting on the train got to be school-wide news and an endless source of joking, yet Draco's farcical injury from Buckbeak got to be a real tragedy. Obviously Rowling wrote it that way, but it made no sense and bordered on the usual caricature - too much black and white and nowhere near enough gray.

Who even told the story? The only people in the cabin (in the novel) with Harry were Lupin, Ginny, Neville, Ron, and Hermione. One of them must have blabbed the story in order for it to have got out, but I find it hard to believe that any of those people would do so. And once again neither Dumbledore nor any other teacher came to Harry's rescue by addressing just what the dementors could do and how they did it, and why it affected some people so badly - to head off teasing and bullying. Once again the school staff is bordering on being outright abusive toward its students.

Harry's rule-breaking and sneaking around again pays off as he gets some inside info, and learns that not only is Sirius his godfather, but he's also the man who betrayed his parents to Voldemort - so it's believed. Of course, a simple dose of veritaserum would have cleared all of this up a dozen years ago, yet no one thought to administer it? Sirius cared so little for his godson that he was willing to do ten years in Azkaban rather than fight to gain his freedom so he could take care of Harry? Poor writing, Rowling!

Yet again the stupidity of the wizard world is revealed as they hand down the verdict - Buckbeak must die! How weird is it that no one thought to use the time-turner to go back and witness what actually happened? Instead they have a court case where they give evidence? This was just plainly stupid, yet this is the kind of fly-trap you set up for yourself when you write about these topics, and when you create a world where anything is possible, including time-travel. If you're not extremely careful, it traps you more effectively than any Devil's Snare could do!

Thinking that Buckbeak has now joined the headless hunt, the three kids wander off, and arrive at the whomping willow in time for Ron to be grabbed by the dog and launched into the tunnel. Here again, the plot hole is astoundingly large. Why did Sirius do that? Why did he not simply pull a petrificus totalus on Scabbers and then explain everything? Because the drama has to be drawn out! Rowling is nowhere near done making Harry a victim, and making him suffer and feel threatened in this novel yet, but this is an enormous fault in the writing.

Even in the Shrieking Shack, Sirius still fails to identify who it is he's after. Despite having everything to prove Sirius innocent, they manage to still blow it, and Scabbers escapes. Not a one of them seems to be able to pull out the petrificus totalus spell for no other reason than that Rowling chose to write it this way. The same goes for failing to reuse the time-turner to go back and grab the Scab.

The time-travel was fun, though. It's always a good time when people have to avoid themselves. And once again, despite all the holes and problems, Rowling told a gripping story which drew in her audience and locked them in for another four volumes!

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by JK Rowling

Rating: WORTHY!

Volume two removes the contemporary Voldemort completely from the picture, but puts in his place a younger version so we can learn some of Voldemort's history. Plus it adds a pretty cool adventure and a kind of treasure hunt, which I think is why this was so successful. In addition to that, Rowling wisely introduces a host of new and cool ideas and characters, of whom I think Tom Riddle (nicely named!) is the most intriguing and interesting.

Dobby the house elf is a complete disaster in my book. To me he's the Jar-Jar Binks of the Harry Potter series. All he had to do was tell Harry that there's a high risk of a monster being unleashed at Hogwarts which can kill students, but no! I was not glad so much as relieved, I guess you'd say, when he was killed off! But here again is a plot hole. If elf magic is so powerful - as we're repeatedly reminded - how come Dobby died from a mere knife wound? He couldn't save himself? "Reparo" doesn't work on knife wounds?

Dobby is introduced in a way which dumps on poor Harry so Rowling can yet again try to tug on our heart strings. It makes no sense at all, though. Clearly the magic was done by the elf, yet Harry is censured for it? Is the ministry so stupid that it can't tell the difference between elf magic and wizard magic? Once again we have the idea that wizards and witches are really dumb reinforced: they're obviously so stupid that they can't see that Harry doesn't possess the ability to perform such a spell.

The flying car is one more example of how impulsive and stupid Ron and Harry are. They never seem to learn, which is as sad as it's ironic, given that they're students! Flying broomsticks outside of school, fine, flying cars not??? It's also an example of how contrived the plot ideas are. On the other hand, it does introduce yet another cool idea and gives them a bonding adventure, which is what appealed to the readers, especially when the car comes to the rescue of Ron and Harry after that idiot Hagrid yet again puts their lives in jeopardy by sending them to visit Aragog. And that name? It's a great test of your geek index if you can tell the difference between Aragog, Aragorn, and Eragon....

Gilderoy Lockhart was portrayed perfectly by Kenneth Branagh in the movie, but I have to wonder about the whole business hiring of him in the first place. Rowling excuses the choice in the book by telling us that no one wanted to apply for the position, so he was the only option, but this not only a lie, it serves to make Dumbledore look truly incompetent and stupid that he would hire someone who is clearly a poseur and a fraud, to teach such an important subject (and there's more on this particular topic in my review of volume three in this series). If Dumbledore didn't know Lockhart was a fraud, then Dumbledore is stupid and incompetent. If he did and still hired him, then he's incompetent and stupid!

The whole business of the Defense Against the Dark Arts teaching post was a joke which was, in a way, amusing, but which was also a plot hole. There were two eminently qualified people for the job right there at Hogwarts: Dumbledore and Snape. I never saw it explained in any way why Snape wasn't the dark arts teacher. They could have easily hired someone else for potions as volume six proves.

If Dumbledore trusted Snape, as we're told repeatedly, then he was unquestionably the best person for the job. If Dumbledore didn't want Snape there for whatever reason, then why did he not get off his lazy ass and do some teaching himself?! Again, it made no sense whatsoever, but the story was written so amusingly, with so many interesting bits and pieces thrown into the mix that readers, even curmudgeonly ones like me, were drawn in and induced to forgive if not forget!

Soon we begin seeing paralyzed pupils and learn the dark history of Hogwarts. And we get another look at the dangerous if not deadly game of Quidditch. Kudos to Rowling for inventing a cool game (for twelve-year-old readers), but it makes no sense that a school which otherwise claims to have student welfare at heart, to have an inherently violent and dangerous sport for them to play. It's actually insupportable, but Rowling gets away with it because the excitement and danger appeal to the age for which she was writing.

What I resent most about these books is not actually the plot holes I'm detailing, but that we never learn more about how Rowling did it - how she came up with these ideas. I've never seen anything in which Rowling discusses how she even came up with all these characters and nifty items. That, to me, would have been truly interesting. Maybe she does so on Pottermore, to which I've never been, but somehow I doubt it. Maybe she doesn't even remember at this point, but to me, those kinds of things would have been really interesting to read about and very useful to others who want to write successful fiction.

I find it interesting that after screwing up Harry's broken arm, Lockhart pays no penalty. It does allow Harry to be in the right place at the right time to get some more information, of course, which is why this glaring lapse got through. Of course, Dobby, who could have solved the whole problem vanishes before he tells Harry anything of use, but then we get to discover that Colin Creevey has been paralyzed, too.

About that paralysis! It's termed 'petrified' in the novel, but this means, literally, turned to stone. If they cannot revivify a dead wizard using magic, how on Earth is it that they can revivify a stone and turn it back into a healthy, normal human with no harm? This made no sense, but once again it gets a bye because it's a cool kind of an idea and by the time the human petrifications begin, we're already wrapped up on the latest Harry quest. They do have a bit of an out in that none of the students (or the cat) is actually hit by the direct glare of the basilisk, but still, it's a stretch to believe their heart has literally stopped beating, and yet they're not dead and can be revived.

Once again Harry is thrown to the wolves as he speaks Parsel tongue during the duel. If it's so rare and so misunderstood, how come everyone instantly understands what it is and what Harry has done? And how come Dumbledore doesn't come clean with Harry? Well, it's to ramp-up the tension, of course, but it's still a failing, realistically. In fact, the inability of one character to communicate with another is both a problem and a characteristic of this series.

The problem here is that the attacks inexplicably stop. It's supposed to be because Tom Riddle has started focusing on Harry instead of trying to kill off the students, but this fails completely as an explanation. Harry doesn't find the diary immediately, yet the attacks stop. Of course Rowling has to stretch the story to cover the school year, but this is a big and unexplained gap. The diary, again, is a cool idea, though, especially given its importance in light of what we discover in volume six.

Hagrid is arrested as a suspect and sent to Azkaban without trial. No one seems to find this unacceptable! Bizarre. The idiot sends Harry and Ron to meet Aragog, the giant deadly spider who has no regard whatsoever for Hagrid's friends. Fortunately their car rescues them, which was pretty neat. Thus they're led to Moaning Myrtle and to the entrance to the chamber of secrets - a place which the greatest wizard in the world, Dumbledore, failed to find!

The incident with Ron's wand backfiring and rendering Lockhart into even more of a mindless dilettante than he was before is amusing, but the plot hole here is how Ron managed to make it through quite literally the entire school year with no working wand? It's unexplained! This business of the broken wand rendering the wizard useless is also unexplained, and becomes important in volume five where the six students consistently fail to disarm the death eaters and thereby get Sirius Black killed. But once again the result of the spell also leaves Harry alone to face the evil as he did in the previous book.

We learn that Tom Marvolo Riddle is an anagram for "I am Lord Voldemort". I don't get the power of this "Lord" business. It's such a huge trope that people never even think about it anymore. We see it not only in fantasy, but also in sci-fi. In the stories, Lords are always powerful and/or dangerous - and nothing like their real life counterparts, who are typically doddering and pretty much useless. Why did he take the name? Is this something Voldemort would do? Why not King Voldemort or Emperor Voldemort? We never did find out why he chose Voldemort as a name. Was it nothing more than simply using up the remaining letters after Rowling had created "I am Lord" from his name?! Pathetic. Or was it the other way around - "Voldemort" came from Tom Riddle as a childish nickname?

If all it took to reincarnate him was to suck the life out of Ginny, then why wasn't this the first thing he did? Why go through all the bullshit about killing off Muggles (which he did only half-heartedly at best). Obviously it was to create a dramatic climax, but it was perhaps the biggest plot hole in the entire seven novel series. Yet despite this Rowling kept the interest in her stories and got away with it, maintaining her series on an unstoppable roll.