Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
J.K. Rowling
I’d heard a lot about Rowling’s Harry Potter books: They’re the best thing for children’s literacy in decades; they’ve turned TV addicts into fanatical readers-at least for some books; children are turning off their TV’s and reading! Conversely, the books make witchcraft seem harmless or even good; they model bad attitudes and questionable morals; they promote socialist, “politically correct” attitudes.
To all that controversy, how could I resist adding my opinion? And how could I have an opinion without reading the books? Yet, try as I might, I could not get any of the four out of any of the libraries I have access to. One time when I checked via the online card catalogue, I found not one but two copies available-yet by the time I made it to the library, maybe an hour later, both were gone. I couldn’t bring myself to buy one, however; I don’t like to buy a book unless I’ve read it and know it’s worth adding to our library. At Thanksgiving, Kevin came to my rescue, allowing me to borrow the first of the Harry Potter books. (He has all four, and audio tapes, too.)
I found it delightful. I can understand the position of, say, the folks at Timberdoodle (a homeschool supplier I love to buy from because of the quality of their materials), who eschew every mention of magic, even to the extend of “whiting out” parts of books they otherwise approve of! To them, the book would be out of the question. I’m also a little concerned about the overall fascination with magic that the books have engendered in many children, because there are a lot of less–than–innocent approaches to “magic” easily found these days. (Dungeons and Dragons began as a relatively innocent intellectual exercise, but evolved into something quite nasty and begat some really sinister offspring. I would hate to see the same happen with Harry Potter.) I did see a little of the bad attitudes that I’ve heard complaint about: some lying and disrespect, bullying, a bad word...but oh, anyone who has read as many children’s books as I have would know how very, very little there is of that compared to almost any other recently–published children’s book! And there’s a clear delineation between right and wrong, an important distinction missing from many modern books. I’ve not yet read the other books in the series, and many remain to be written, but I can say that this one is a good mystery, and the magic is a natural, rather than a supernatural, phenomenon. The book is a British boarding school story, with the twist that magic is a normal part of life.
Actually, the thing that annoyed me most was that it seems as if someone has invoked an “Americanize” spell on the book. It’s clearly British, set in England, with British attitudes toward school, sports, etc. However, it uses the American definitions of “public” and “private” schools, one of the characters refers to something as the size of a baseball bat, words such as “color” have American spellings, and no doubt there are other inconsistencies that I passed over. Perhaps it makes it less confusing at first for American readers, but in the end—at least if they’re ever going to read real British stories—they’d be better off if it were consistently British. As it is, the half–British, half–American tone makes it seem unreal, set nowhere—which is the last thing you want when you’re trying to make the magical part of it seem plausible.