Harry Potter — Book Series Review

Even though I was a great admirer of the Harry Potter PC games and even liked the first few HP movies, I did not bother reading this universally beloved fantasy series until recently. The gradual decline in the quality of the films made me give up on watching the last few of them and extinguished any ideas of reading the books. Finally, I decided to give it a shot and finished reading all seven Harry Potter books in 13 days last month.

Long story short, they are brilliant.

There is no mistaking that this is a Young Adult book series. It, by no means, reaches extrinsic levels of world-building, complex character arcs or intricate and tightly woven storylines as the likes of ASOIAF and LOTR does. Rowling has written these books using simple, non-demanding vocabulary with short, to-the-point sentences. The characters are mostly unremarkable and single faceted, and the side stories only last for a couple of chapters or a book at the very most. However, despite it having written for children and young adults, Rowling has managed to achieve almost the same levels of fantasy as GRRM and Tolkien did. For a series meant for children and young adults, Harry Potter manages to amaze and enthral even the adult reader appreciably.

It is a series of books which will teach the kids to love, be compassionate, to treat everyone equally — ironic given how transphobic J.K.Rowling has been in the past year — how to deal with tight spots and life in general. Even though she doesn’t practise what she preached, at the time of writing, Rowling had not underestimated her, or her characters’ invaluable position as role models in moulding children’s lives.

These books are bound to provide immense entertainment to the young and the adult reader alike. They are simply magical.