Harry Potter – Jameyanne Fuller

Book Recs Redux

I started this blog just over seven years ago, in 2013, before I started my senior year of college. (Excuse me for a moment while I go hide in a corner and feel old.) In early 2015, while I was working in Italy, I set up my book recs page, and I’ve been adding to it with my favorites of the books I read each year. Recently, I looked through the list and realized that not only is it getting to be a bit unwieldy, but there are also several books I wouldn’t recommend anymore, and the list doesn’t accurately reflect my tastes as a reader and books I would want to share with friends and family. So this week, I removed a bunch of books from the list, and you can go see the new and improved list right over here.

This pruning of my book recs page also made me think a lot about myself as a reader. I have read a lot over the past five years. And I mean a lot. Since I started tracking my reading goals on Goodreads in 2016, I have read 514 books: 62 in 2016, 77 in 2017, 176 in 2018, 109 in 2019, and 90-one so far in 2020. Yikes! But reading so much so fast has changed me as a reader, and I’m certainly not the same person I was at the start of 2016. So I thought this was also a good time to take a step back and think about how my reading tastes have changed and how I evaluate what books I like and what books I love so much I would recommend them to others.

I’ve read a lot of new genres and authors over the last few years. Recently, my reading habits have definitely skewed toward fantasy and science fiction. I’ve especially been enjoying getting into new science fiction stories, because I never used to read sci fi, though I definitely prefer my sci fi to be more space-related than not. I’ve also become pickier about the literary, contemporary, and historical fiction I read. I’ve struggled a lot more to get into those books, and I actually put a historical fiction book down recently, which is really rare for me. In terms of middle grade and young adult, I’ve found that while I adore middle grade fantasy, I’m usually not as captivated by contemporary middle grade stories, though there are some that I do love dearly and are still on the list. I want to read more middle grade science fiction, because what I have read I really like, and also I’m working on a middle grade sci fi project right now. I’ve also found I’m pickier with YA of all genres. I tend to like the fantasy and sci fi books more, but there are some contemporaries I still absolutely love as well.

My big takeaway from looking at all this is that I have become a lot pickier and a lot less forgiving as a reader. I really only find myself recommending books I absolutely love, and if I feel like I need to recommend a book or series with a caveat, I tend not to recommend it. So the books I list on my book recs page now are books that I not only loved when I read them but books that I still love, books that have stayed with me in some way or another and are still meaningful to me.

I’m not going to list here which books I removed from the page. To be clear, these were good books and series, and I really enjoyed them when I read them, so I certainly don’t want to put them down by calling them out. That being said, if you remember something was on the old list and want to talk about why I cut it, I’m happy to chat about that in the comments.

Generally speaking, there were a few reasons I removed the books I did. at this point, I honestly couldn’t tell you what some of the books were about, so while I enjoyed them at the time, they obviously haven’t stuck with me, and I don’t feel like I can honestly recommend them now.

Some of the books and series that I recommended in the past were books and series that I enjoyed even though I recognized they had serious flaws. Sometimes I recommended them because I was interested in the flaws, or because the flaws inspired me as a writer. I have removed these books for a few reasons. Firstly, because as I’ve said above, I’m a lot less forgiving of major flaws than I once was. And secondly, because a book recs page that is just a list of books I would recommend with no explanation of whyI recommend them doesn’t seem like the place for these books. In the future, I might write posts about what intrigued me or inspired me about these books, but they aren’t books I would recommend.

Finally, I removed books that I felt I could not recommend for social justice reasons. Over the past several years, I have become much more aware of diversity, inclusion, and representation in what I’m reading, and I have become much better at critically engaging with the text. This is not to say that all the books on my book recs page are paragons of diversity and representation. Several certainly have problems, and one day I will write a whole post on how you can love something and recommend something while still recognizing and engaging with its flaws (thank you to the folks over at the Tortall Recall podcast for teaching me this important lesson). But there were a few books on my list that I have come to realize have serious enough problems that I am just no longer comfortable recommending them.

Which brings me to the one and only series that I removed from the list and am going to call out by name: Harry Potter. This is also the series which I regret most removing from my book recs page, because it has meant so much to me over the years. I’ve bestruggling with how J.K. Rowling’s transphobic comments all summer affect how I feel about the books. Rowling has always been a writer I admire, and the Harry Potter books have remained incredibly important to me. It broke my heart that someone who wrote such powerful books about accepting difference and love being the strongest kind of magic could believe and say such awful, hateful things. This letter on Tor.com does such a good job expressing my feelings. I am not trans, but I have friends who are, and I have been bullied because I’m different too. I can’t stand by silently mourning how she has forever-tainted the book series that has served as a beloved touchstone for my whole generation, and worse, the harm she is doing to trans people all over the world, because to remain silent is to condone her comments. And her comments have become more and more hateful in the last few months.

I have come to the conclusion that whatever she says, the Harry Potter books are ours now, not hers. I love them. I can’t turn that off. They have still affected how I read and write even today. They are flawed books, certainly, but they still send a strong and lasting message about the power of love and friendship and acceptance. But there’s a difference between me continuing to love the books and me actively recommending the books. Because as Lindsay Ellis said in this video about death of the author, recommending the books gives J.K. Rowling more power and more influence. I do not in any way agree with J.K. Rowling’s views, and I do not want my continued appreciation of the original Harry Potter books to be construed to mean that I do agree with her.

If I were to recommend the Harry Potter books, it would come with a major caveat: borrow them from the library or from a friend, or by them from a used bookstore, because by purchasing these books new, you are supporting an author who has turned out to be a hateful bigot. But part of repising my book recs page, as I said above, has included removing books that I would recommend with caveats. And so it is with a heavy heart that I have taken Harry Potter off the list.

That turned into a bit more of a rant than I originally intended, but as much as I didn’t want to remove Harry Potter from the list, I would also be really uncomfortable doing it silently, without explaining why. As with the other books I took off the list, I still think the original Harry Potter series is really good and worth reading, but it doesn’t belong on my list anymore.

And that’s it. You can go check out my leaner book recs page over here, and if you’re curious why a book you remember being there is gone, I’m happy to chat about it in the comments. I’d also like to know if you’ve read any of the books on the list and what you think of them, and of course I will always take more book recommendations.

August Reading Roundup

I was all set to post this on Friday, and then the news of RBG’s death broke, and I reached levels of despair about the state of the world I haven’t felt since March. It’s hard to believe that 2020 could get any worse, but on top of the plague, huge parts of the country are literally on fire right now, I don’t even know what hurricane is hitting where at this point, and I don’t even have words to express what RBG’s death and the upcoming battle for the Supreme Court means to me, so yes, 2020 did get worse. A lot worse. To my friends affected by the fires and the floods and the plague, my thoughts are with you. Please stay safe. And for anyone feeling hopeless, there are steps we can take beyond just wringing our hands and panicking. I never wanted this blog to be about politics, but I can’t ignore the fact that our very democracy is at stake. This is the time to call your senators, donate to campaigns, volunteer, and vote, vote, vote.

But this post isn’t really about politics. It’s about books. So let’s talk about books.

Nothing major happened for me in August. I continued to stay home and work from home and take Neutron for as many walks as I can. This past week marked my one-year anniversary working at the FCC, which is really cool. I definitely feel more confident in my work than I did on day 1, but it also doesn’t feel like it’s been a whole year, probably because half of that time I’ve been at home.

Collage of the covers of the books I read in August: Midnight Sun, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, Life and Death, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, A Constellation of Roses, Uprooted, Sticks and Stones, Artemis Fowl, Midnight at the Barclay Hotel, and The Mystwick School of Musicraft. I read eleven books this August. This felt like a minor miracle to me when I counted them all up, because in case you didn’t read my whole post on Midnight Sun, I got kind of hung up on Twilight again. Two of the books I read were in Braille, which gets me up to eight Braille books a month, which means I’m back on track to reach my goal of reading twelve books in Braille this year. There wasn’t quite as much variety in what I read last month as I’ve noticed in the past few months, but I still really enjoyed most of what I read. Three of the books I read were rereads, but the rest were new to me. I read one YA contemmporary; four middle grade fantasies, one of them a mystery, and two YA fantasies; three YA paranormals; and one fantasy that I’m honestly not sure what age category it belongs to. I also got two books on the day they came out in August and just blasted through them. I haven’t done that in a long time and it was really fun. For one of those books I also got to attend a virtual launch party, and I’ll talk about that experience in a bit.

My first book of August was A Constellation of Roses by Miranda Asebedo. Tricks has been on her own and on the run from the foster care system ever since her mom abandoned her. And she’s good at being on her own, because she can steal anything she wants, and she’s never caught. When the police finally do catch up with her, she’s given a choice, prison or going to live with her father’s family in the middle of nowhere. Tricks never met her father, never knew she had other family, but they welcome her with open arms. And it turns out she’s not the only one who do magic with her hands. All the women in her new family have special, powerful talents. As you must know by now, I’m a sucker for found family stories. Throw in a pie shop and a little magic, and I’m hooked. I really enjoyed this book and would definitely recommend.

After that, I squeezed in the second Upside-Down Magic book, Sticks and Stones, by Sarah Mlynowski, Emily Jenkins, and Lauren Myracle. Strange things are happening at Nory’s new school, and everyone is blaming the Upside-down Magic kids. They’re even starting a petition to end the UDM program and kick the UDM kids out of school. Nory and her friends have to figure out who is trying to frame them, and working in a little kittenball wouldn’t go amiss either. This book was just as fun and delightful and full of heart as the last one. By this point I’ve read the third one too, and I can say this series is definitely going on the favorites list unless it goes, well, upside-down.

Then Midnight Sun came out and I was lost. As I’ve discussed at length over here, I loved Midnight Sun despite the many reasons I probably shouldn’t. And then, because Midnight Sun got me stuck back in the Twilight world again, I read The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner and Twilight Reimagined: Life and Death, both also by Stephenie Meyer. I think I read Bree Tanner my first year of college, though I didn’t remember it until I reread it. And you know what, it was actually a lot better than I was expecting. Life and Death, though, was another matter. I was torn between hysterical laughter and utter horror as I read it. Far from demonstrating that the story would have worked if Bella was a boy, I actually feel like Life and Death made the mysogyny in the Twilight books that much worse. The two scenes in the original series that involve sexual violence against female characters are simply changed to muggings gone wrong, which is an excellent example of the idea that if the crime can be changed that easily, then it’s only a sexual crime because the victim is a woman and that’s not great. Never mind that Edythe (AKA female Edward, also I can’t get over the spelling of that name) frequently has less agency than Edward, and her inability to stay away from Beau comes across more as because she’s a girl, and I’m just going to stop here because this book made me really angry and I don’t even want to rant about it. Life and Death was an interesting experiment, I guess, but it didn’t work for me. But on the upside, it did the trick of getting me out of Twilight world for the moment.

After I read Midnight Sun, but before I read Bree Tanner and Life and Death, I spent a lot of time trying to find books that interested me enough that I wanted to read them instead of reading Twilight again. I ended up reading Uprooted by Naomi Novik. Did I pick it up because a friend described it as like Twilight for her? Yes, yes I did. But I didn’t find it to be very like Twilight for me. Every ten years, the lord of the valley, the immortal wizard called the Dragon, chooses a seventeen-year-old girl to be his servant for the next ten years. This is the price for the Dragon’s protection against the corrupted wood encroaching on the valley. Agniescka is seventeen this year, but she, like everyone else, is convinced the Dragon is going to choose her best friend, Kasia. Except, of course, he picks Agniescka. Because Agniescka has something the other village girls do not. She has the power to become a witch herself. The strongest aspects of this book for me was Agniescka discovering and grappling with the consequences of her new power and Agniescka and Kasia’s friendship. I didn’t really find all the political intrigue, epic war, and romance parts of the book all that interesting, and on the whole I felt like I was dragging myself through the book, which was unfortunate. It’s entirely possible I was still in recovery from Midnight Sun, but on the whole I’m sorry to say this isn’t a book I would recommend.

Next, I read Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer. I’ve never read these books before, and after a lot of friends telling me they were good, and a desire to be able to join in on the discourse around the new movie, I got the first one out of the library and gave it a shot. Artemis Fowl is an evil genius. Also a millionaire. And a criminal mastermind. And did I mention genius. His father has disappeared and his mother is slowly going insane from the grief of losing his father. And Artemis has concocted a plan to get his hands on some fairy gold. Only he might have bitten off a bit more than he could chew when he kidnaps the fairy lieutenant Holly Short and soon finds his house under siege. This book started out slow for me, but it picked up really quickly and on the whole was fun and engaging. I have the second book out of the library now and I can’t wait to read it.

After that, I sped through Midnight At the Barclay Hotel by Fleur T. Bradley. This was a middle grade mystery/ghost story that reminded me a lot of And Then There Were None, the one and only Agatha Christie book I’ve ever read. A whole bunch of people are invited to the Barclay Hotel in the mountains of Colorado for a weekend getaway. Twelve-year-old ghost hunting JJ tags along with his mother, and bookish Penny comes with her grandfather. JJ and Penny befriend Emma, who’s lived at the hotel her whole life. They’re all set to have a fun weekend full of cupcakes and bowling and swimming pools and of course trying to find the ghosts rumored to haunt the Barclay Hotel. But then the butler announces that the owner of the hotel, Mr. Barclay, has been murdered, and all of the adults are suspects, so the kids set out to figure out who the killer is and to prove JJ’s mom didn’t do it. This was such a fun, fast mystery with all kinds of twists and turns. I loved the characters, and the twists were exactly right for the story. This was the second book of August that I snatched up the day it came out and just sped through. (Yes, the first was Midnight Sun.) I also went to the virtual launch party Fleur Bradley held, and it was so cool to hear her talk about how to write a mystery and where the ideas for the Barclay Hotel came from. On the whole, this was a great book and I would definitely recommend.

Then I got The Mystwick School of Musicraft by Jessica Khoury from Audible. It was free with their new Audible+ thing, and I’ve had it on my wishlist for a while, so I grabbed it, and oh I loved it so so much! Amelia Jones wants only to go to Mystwick and become a maestro, basically a super high-powered magical musician, and learn about her mother, who attended Mystwick herself and whom Amelia knows very little about. But then she fails her audition in a horrible way—like she gave the maestro a very, very impressive mustache kind of way. She thinks all hope is lost, and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. But then a mix-up leads to her getting a second chance. If, after two months at Mystwick, the maestros think she’s Mystwick material, she can stay. But not only is the work harder than anything she’s ever done in her life, someone is out to get her, and something dark and sinister is closing in on Mystwick. I feel like my description of this book doesn’t do it justice, but it is absolutely fabulous. Magical music stories are right up there with found family stories and space adventures for me, so I was probably bound to love this no matter what. But I adore all the characters, and I was hooked from start to finish. It was fast and fun and full of so many feelings. And the audiobook had actual musicians playing the songs the kids were playing in the background, which made it super epic. I don’t know if there are going to be any sequels to this but I would be so so happy if Mystwick was a series.

Finally, I finished the Harry Potter series with Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows. My thoughts on the books themselves haven’t changed, but finishing the series this time felt especially bittersweet to me (mostly, bitter actually). I don’t know when I’ll pick them up again. I do plan to reread them in Italian before I go back to Italy, because I need to practice and I already own them in Italian and never finished them. But I don’t know when I’m going back to Italy. The plan was this October but with Covid of course that’s not happening, and it’s not happening any time soon. Also, as she-who-must-not-be-named continues to demonstrate her despicable transphobia, I just don’t feel right rereading the books again when there are so many other books out there that are just as good and whose authors aren’t horrible people. On the other hand, Harry Potter is such a huge part of who I am—it shaped me as a reader, a writer, and a person—and I’m not ready to just let the books go. So I don’t know, and adding all those mixed feelings to the Battle of Hogwarts was a lot.

And that’s it for August. Let me know if you’ve read any of these books and what you thought of them. And of course I will always happily take more recommendations for found family, magical music, and space adventure stories.

July Reading Roundup

As I’ve mentioned in my last few posts, July was a pretty hard month for me emotionally. Mostly because it sunk in that this pandemic is here to stay and I’m not going back to work or going to see my friends for several more months, possibly almost a year. I recognize that I am extremely lucky. I have a stable job where I can work from home, I’m in a safe place, and I’m not struggling to get food or anything. But as much as I want to go back to work and see my colleagues and have writing group in person and go to trivia with friends and work-out at in-person barre classes and all the great things I was doing pre-pandemic, I also don’t want to venture out of my safe bubble unless I absolutely have to. The outside is kind of terrifying. Social distancing is not designed for the blind, and I have to rely on other people doing the right thing all too often for my own comfort. So my feelings are all confused.

So in July, I did what I always do when I have feelings. I read. A lot.

Collage of the 14 books I read in July: Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, Breaking Dawn, The Sound of Stars, Orbiting Jupiter, You Should See Me in a Crown, The Kingdom of Back, Chasing Secrets, Record of a Spaceborn Few, The Waste Lands, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Castle Hangnail, and Upside-down Magic I read fourteen books in July, bringing my total for the year up to seventy-two. Six of them were rereads. I read two sci fi, two contemporaries, four paranormals, four fantasies—two of them middle grade—and two historical novels—one of them a historical fantasy. One of the books I read was in Braille, bringing me up to six Braille books for the year so far. I’m still one behind where I want to be to meet my goal of reading twelve Braille books this year, but I’ll catch up. This was a very eclectic reading month, and I really liked most everything I read.

I started July with The Sound of Stars by Alechia Dow. Aliens have invaded Earth, trapped all the humans in centers where they have to work for the invaders, and banned all forms of art because they inspire rebellion. Janelle is a human teenager operating a very illegal library of books she managed to save from the aliens’ purge. Morris is a teenage alien with too-much of an interest in human art. When Morris discovers Janelle’s library, he doesn’t turn her in, on the condition that she find him some music. But then they’re caught and they have to run for it, and then they wind up trying to stop the aliens from turning Earth into an alien resort planet. I love so much about this book. I love watching Janelle and Morris grow from enemies, to suspicious but curious companions, to friends, to something more than friends. I love that Janelle is such a diverse YA protagonist. She’s black, queer, fat, and has a thyroid condition. It’s not important to the plot, but it’s who she is and I love it. Most of all, because I’m as much of a nerd as these two, I love all the references to my favorite books: Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Twilight, The Mortal Instruments, The Hate U Give, and even The Light Between Worlds. My only problem with this book is the ending, and it’s only a problem if there isn’t going to be a sequel. Without giving spoilers, if there isn’t a sequel, then that was a really unsatisfying ending. If there is a sequel, it is a great ending. But I don’t know if there is going to be a sequel yet. So we’ll see.

Next I reread all four of the Twilight books by Stephenie Meyer. I’ve already talked about these at length over here, so if you’re curious go check that out. I’m not going to reiterate my thoughts here, because I’m currently trying to dig myself out of the Twilight-shaped hole I fell into post-Midnight Sun. Never fear, Midnight Sun will be getting its own post too, because I have so many feelings.

Next, I read The Kingdom of Back by Marie Lu. This was a fascinating historical fantasy book. It’s about Mozart and his older sister as children, growing up and touring Europe as composers and musicians, and also their adventures in a fantasy world called the Kingdom of Back. I knew vaguely that Mozart had a sister and that she composed and even that there are theories that she composed some of his pieces, and this was a great look into what it must have been like for her growing up in Mozart’s shadow because she was a girl. I admit I had a hard time with this book at first, because the excursions into The Kingdom of Back felt disjointed, and at times while I was reading this, I didn’t understand why Marie Lu didn’t just write this book about any two children, instead of tying it to the Mozarts. But then I read the author’s note at the end of the book, which said that there’s historical evidence that the Mozart children did in fact invent a fantasy land they called The Kingdom of Back while on tour in Europe. This made it all make sense, and I wish I’d read the Author’s note first. This wound up being a really good book, and I would definitely recommend it.

After that, I read Orbiting Jupiter by Gary D. Schmidt. This was a short contemporary middle frade book. I read it in one evening. Twelve-year-old Jack has a new foster brother, and the new foster brother has a daughter he has been separated from. This book deals with all the preconceived notions foster children with troubled pasts might have to face. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking and I just love it. I was definitely balling my eyes out by the end of it. And I definitely recommend this book.

I needed something light after that, so I reread Castle Hangnail by Ursula Vernon. Castle Hangnail needs a new master, but when twelve-year-old Molly Utterback arrives claiming to be a wicked witch, well it’s not what anyone expected. Crazy adventures ensue, including deals made with magical moles, turning donkeys into dragons, and fending off a corrupt real estate agent with his own shadow. And then of course the evil sorceress who’s supposed to be Castle Hangnail’s real master appears. This is such a fun book and I love it so much and I will always love it.

Then, because I love middle grade fantasy and Castle Hangnail wasn’t enough to satisfy me, I read Upside-Down Magic by Sarah Mlynowski, Emily Jenkins, and Lauren Myracle. Nory’s magic does not do what it’s supposed to do. Instead of turning into a kitten, she turns into a dragon-kitten, or dritten. Instead of turning into a skunk, she turns into a skunk-elephant, or skunkafant. When Nory’s wonky magic causes her to fail the entrance exams to her father’s prestigious magic school, he sends her to live with her aunt and attend a program at the local public school for upside-down magic. Nory meets a bunch of new friends with magic as crazy as hers. She deals with bullies and magical accidents and also how much she hates that she doesn’t have normal magic. This book was just so much fun, and I loved it lots. I’ve since read the second book and loved that too.

After that I read Chasing Secrets by Jennifer Choldenko. What I didn’t realize when I picked this up is this is a plague book. Oops. Lizzie is the daughter of a prominent doctor in San Francisco in 1901. There’s an outbreak of bubonic plague, and Chinatown has been quarantined, and the family’s Chinese cook is trapped inside the quarantine. But Lizzie knows what a quarantine should look like, and the Chinatown quarantine isn’t that. Lizzie is determined to get their cook out and to uncover the truth about the plague. Even though this is a middle grade book, it deals with issues of class, gender, and race in the early 1900s. The plague aspect of this book was pretty disturbing right now, so if you’re interested in reading this, I might wait to read it until the plague is over here. I’m also not sure the subplot about Lizzie’s brother was satisfying to me, but on the whole this was a good book.

My next book was also about a girl named Liz, though this was not an intentional choice on my part. I’ve been adding a lot of books by Black authors to my want to read shelf on Goodreads, and this month I got You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson out of the library. Liz is depending on getting a music scholarship to attend her top-choice school, and when she doesn’t get it, she decides to run for prom queen to try to get the scholarship that comes with it. Her hometown takes prom, and the race for prom court, very, very seriously. We follow Liz as she steps way outside her comfort zone and makes new friends, mends old relationships, falls in love with the new girl in school, and faces down some truly epic mean girls who are trying to use her race and sexuality to force her out of the race. This is a great book, and I had so much fun reading it. I actually caught myself wishing I’d gone to my own high school prom (I came to my senses later and have no regrets). I definitely recommend this book.

Next, I read The Waste Lands by Stephen King, the third book in the Dark Tower series. I think this was my favorite book in the series so far. Until we got to the suicidal talking pink monorail, which, I’m sorry, I just can’t take seriously.

And then I read the next book in Becky Chambers’s Wayfarers series, Record of a Spaceborn Few. This book follows a group of people living on the Exodan Fleet, the fleet that left Earth hundreds of years ago. Among these characters is Ashby’s sister (Ashby is the captain of the Wayfarer in the first book). This book is really about the lifestyle of these particular humans and how some cling to it, some reject it, and some seek it out. And it’s beautiful and I love it. I just love these books so so much, and I can’t wait for the next one to come out in 2021.

And finally, it took me all month, but I reread Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J. K. Rowling. I also talked about this a little in my Twilight post. It was a hard book to read, particularly this month, because the ministry’s denial of Voldemort’s return feels very much like certain politicians in the U.S. denying the coronavirus and letting it run wild. But I read it, and enjoyed it by the end.

And that’s it for the month of July. Have you read any of these books? Do you agree with my thoughts?

June Reading Roundup

Well, we’ve made it to July, though honestly I’m not sure if we have indeed made it or if we’re going to make it much longer. The best I can say is we are more than halfway through this disaster of a year. But as coronavirus cases are rising all over the country again and there’s no end in sight, I’ve kind of given into the existential dread I was fighting off in April. We’re all going to die. If someone could convince me otherwise I would really appreciate it. Because I haven’t been sleeping or writing much or generally feeling like a human. Which is why

i’m writing this so late into the month this time despite my really good intentions to get it done sooner.

So let’s talk about the books I read in June.

Collage of the covers of the books I read in June: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Mockingjay, Briar's Book, We Must Be Brave, Speak, A Closed and Common Orbit,Such a Fun Age, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and The Witches I read eleven books in June, bringing my grand total for 2020 up to fifty-eight books. Five of the books were rereads for me. Four were dystopians, one was science fiction, one was historical fiction, two were contemporary, and three were fantasy. And I read one book in Braille, bringing the number of Braille books I’ve read in 2020 to five, just one behind where I should be if I’m going to reach my goal of reading twelve books in Braille this year.

I started June with the prequel to the Hunger Games trilogy, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins. This was the story of the Tenth Hunger Games, and young President Snow, who acts as a mentor the first year mentors are included in the Games. I flew through this book, but I didn’t enjoy it very much. I found the worldbuilding fascinating. I loved seeing how the Games started and how they became what they are in the main trilogy. But I didn’t like being in Snow’s head. Knowing that he’s going to end up president meant that all his struggles in this book felt meaningless, because there were no stakes—everything was going to turn out fine. And Snow wasn’t really a compelling enough character to pull that kind of thing off, at least for me. Also the pacing of this book was really weird. So if you’re interested in the worldbuilding, this book might be for you, but otherwise I honestly wouldn’t recommend it.

I followed this up with a reread of the original three Hunger Games books because why not? My opinions of these books were largely the same as they have been in the past. I loved the first book. The second book was really good but again the pacing was weird, and I have strong negative feelings about the third book that I’ve ranted about in the past so won’t bore you with now. Despite the ending, this series remains one of my favorites, and it was nice to reread it right now.

Next, I finished my reread of Tamora Pierce’s Circle of Magic series with Briar’s Book. in this book, Briar and the girls face down an epidemic. I was worried about rereading this book, because it’s very much a plague book, but it was actually kind of a nice read. It was nice to escape to a world where the plague is taken seriously and everyone is behaving responsibly and a cure can be found. Plus I love these four young mages and this whole world. This series also remains a favorite for me and I continue to highly recommend.

My aunt gave my mom We Must be Brave by Frances Liardet for her birthday, and when I found out it was a World War II book, I picked it up too, because I love World War II books. We must be brave is about a couple living in the English countryside who discover a little girl alone on a bus full of evacuees. The girl apparently got on the bus by mistake, and the couple take her in while they try to contact her family. They never wanted children, but the little girl takes over their lives completely and becomes theirs as the war rages on. And then her family appears. The premise of the book really hooked me in, but honestly I was disappointed by this book. I found it to be slow to the point of tedium at points, melodramatic and maudlin at others. And it also just would not end. I can see why some people would like it, but personally I wouldn’t recommend it.

After that, I read Speak by Laurie Hals Anderson. This was a powerful and heartbreaking book about a girl finding the strength to speak up after she was raped a party the summer before high school. i never actually read this book when I was a kid, but I know a lot of people who did and I feel like it should be required reading for all teens.

I needed something fun after that, so I read the second book in The Wayfarer’s series, A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers. At first, this book threw me a little because it doesn’t follow the same crew as the first book. It follows Lovelace the AI, now trying to adjust to life in an illegal human body kit, and Pepper, the mechanic we met in the previous book. But once I got used to these new characters, I was totally won over by both of their stories and their struggles and their growth and I was totally crying by the end. I loved how different this book was from the first, but how it was still connected. I also love this amazing universe Becky Chambers has created, and all these great characters with these wonderful heartwarming relationships. I am just dying to read the next book!

Then I read Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid. I’ve had this on my list for a while and just happened to get off the waiting list at the library during June. So yes it was topical but not on purpose. Such A Fun Age is about a young black woman, Amira, who babysits for a three-year-old white girl, Briar, and Briar’s blogger mom whose name I cannot remember. When there’s a family emergency one night and Briar’s mom asks Amira to take Briar to the market down the street to get her out of the house, Amira is accused of kidnapping Briar, and so begins a chain of events as Amira tries to move on with her life and Briar’s well-intentioned mom tries desperately to make amends. I loved this book. Not just because it was topical in today’s climate but because it was about so much more than the incident in the market, though of course that was central. All of the characters in this book were fully developed characters, with serious but realistic flaws, and it was really about Amira’s life and her struggles as she grew up and tried to figure out what she wanted to do with her life. The book encompasses the incident in the market and so much more, and I feel like this is a really important book because of that. Also it was very fast-paced and very easy to read. This is definitely one I would recommend.

I was reading the fourth Harry Potter book all month in Braille. It took me so long because first of all, I’m slower at reading in Braille, and second of all, I was really struggling with how I felt about the author and the books. I talked about this last month, so I won’t go into it again here. But at the end of June, I finished rereading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and that’s all I’m saying about it.

And I finished up June with The Witches by Roald Dahl. Like most of the Roald Dahl books I’ve reread in the last couple years, this turned out to be both delightful and horrifying. I know I read this as a child but I had no recollection of it and wow, just wow this was a wild book. A lot of fun but really wild.

And that’s it for the books I read in June. Have you read any of these books? What did you think of them?

April and May Reading Roundup

Well here we are, more than halfway through June, and as usual, I’m abysmally late on posting this. I admit, I’ve been putting it off, because it feels ridiculously insensitive to be posting about the books I read in April and May with the world in the state it’s in. I don’t like to talk about politics online, and anyway I don’t have anything to say that hasn’t been said a hundred times and much more eloquently than I could. But I also can’t stay silent.

At the time I’m writing this, more than one hundred twenty-five thousand people have died from the coronavirus in our country. People are still calling it a hoax and refusing to wear masks. I viscerally hate masks, but wearing one saves lives, so it’s really the only decent thing to do. The pandemic is disproportionately affecting people of color, and meanwhile, our president is focused solely on bringing back the economy and winning the upcoming election. And I get that bringing back the economy is important, I do, but we need to do so safely, and based on the rising number of Covid-19 cases in more than half the country, safety still isn’t the watchword, and this endangers everyone, particularly the people of color who will continue to be disproportionately harmed by the pandemic because of the way our society is built. Last, and certainly not least, we have been reeling over the brutal police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others, and then the police brutality and attacks by right-wing extremists against the peaceful protestors who have come out against the murders and the systemic racism and oppression that enable them. It is high time we are protesting, in all the ways we can, and I only hope we can keep the momentum up through November and beyond, because our country needs real, drastic change. I don’t pretend to know everything there is to know about these issues, but I’m reading and I’m learning and I’m sharing. I am furious. I am furious, and heartbroken, and so stressed out I’m worried I’ve hurt my jaw with all the teeth-grinding I’ve been doing.

Most of this has come about since the end of May. But before that, in April and most of May, I was sheltering in place and freaking out about Covid. And learning all this important stuff. In April, I was so stressed out that I only read one book. I couldn’t focus on anything, and even though I started a bunch of other books, they were mostly library books, and I didn’t finish them before they expired, and then I had to get back on the waiting list. In May, though, I read thirteen books of all different genres. Some were rereads, but most were new. I read three books in Braille which brings my total of Braille books for the year up to four. Still behind where I should be for my goal, but yay! Collage of the covers of the 14 books I read in April and May: Ember Queen; Shadows of Self; The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet; The Deceivers; Circe; There There; the first three Harry Potter books; Spark; Supernova; Daja's Book; Fantastic Mr. Fox and Other Animal Stories; and The Light Between Worlds.

The only book I read in April was Ember Queen by Laura Sebastian, the third book in the Ash Princess trilogy, which came out in February. Anything I say about the plot of this book will spoil the first two if you haven’t already read them. But let’s just say that things are heating up for Theo and her rebellion. Quite literally. I love what Laura Sebastian does with the characters in this book. I particularly love what she does with the villains, and the villains throughout the entire series. It’s really interesting from a writing perspective, and also just so well done. I loved this whole series and would definitely recommend it.

I started off May by finishing Shadows of Self, the second book in Brandon Sanderson’s second Mistborn Trilogy. In this book, Wax is investigating a set of highly improbable murders. We get a lot of Wax’s backstory from before he returned to the city too. I enjoyed this book, but the first two thirds were quite slow by Sanderson’s standards. The ending was heartbreaking though, and I’m looking forward to what comes next.

Next, I read The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. This is the first book in the Wayfarers series, though as I’ve since discovered these books all stand alone and are actually just interconnected novels in the same universe, which I love. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet follows Rosemary, who has signed on as a clerk for a spaceship which creates new wormholes for other ships in the Galactic Commons to use to travel. The ship, the Wayfarer, has an interspecies crew of delightful characters, who embrace Rosemary wholeheartedly. But Rosemary has a secret, and when they are asked to travel for almost a year to build a wormhole to a kplanet at war with the rest of its solar systemand threatening war against the rest of the Galactic Commons, Rosemary’s secret is in danger of coming out. This is the best description I can give this book, because the plot is a bit thin. I’ve seen some reviews claim that this book doesn’t have a plot, but it definitely does. It’s just a very episodic novel, filled with different adventures for each of the crew members. We already know that happy space adventures are 100% my thing, but oh this book was just so much fun! Also it has a great title! It was exactly what I needed to be reading while the world falls apart, and this was the book that really got me out of my April reading slump. I just love it so much, and if you love fun, heartwarming, delightful space adventures too, I highly recommend you give this book a shot.

In May, I started my annual Harry Potter reread. I reread the first three books, Sorcerer’s Stone, Chamber of Secrets, and Prisoner of Azkaban. This time, I was rereading them in Braille. I read these books before J. K. Rowling made all those awful transphobic comments on twitter, and I’ve been working through how I feel about her and the books ever since. Working through my feelings about JKR was pretty easy actually. I’ve been cranky with her ever since Cursed Child, honestly, and we’ve all known she’s transphobic before now, but the fact that she refused to learn from the countless people trying to tell her that her comments are hurtful, hateful, and dangerous for the trans community was too much for me. I’ve been bullied and excluded all my life because I am blind, and I cannot abide anyone who hates and attacks anyone else just because of who they are. So now JKR is she-who-must-not-be-named to me. Sorting out what to do about my feelings for the Harry Potter books themselves is much more complicated. I love these books so much, and I can’t just turn that love off. They have shaped who I am as a person and a writer. I recognize they aren’t great in terms of representation, and they’re actually pretty terrible on some of the sub-issues of the books (the house-elves only ever get better masters but as a species remain enslaved; anyone fat is a terrible person or just plain stupid; Snape is really abusive, but because he’s ultimately a good guy, he’s totally forgiven for that; I could go on). For me personally, I feel it’s important to continue to engage with the books, both because I do love the characters and the story and the fundamental themes of love and acceptence, and because I want to continue to study these books critically and learn from their shortcomings. However I understand that publicly supporting or discussing the books could cause real harm to my trans friends, and I absolutely do not want to do that. I have taken my Hogwarts house off my social media profiles and bios, and I won’t be wearing or displaying any Harry Potter swag in the future. And if I reread the books, I’ll keep it to myself. As I said above, I don’t pretend to know or understand all the issues at play here, but I will keep learning. And as I do, this tentative balance I’ve come to might change. All I’ll say for now is that I reread the first three Harry Potter books in May. Moving on.

Meanwhile, I read The Deceivers by Margaret Peterson Haddix, the sequel to The Strangers which I read earlier this year. In this book, Chess, Emma, and Finn and their friend Natalie have to venture back into the alternate world to rescue their mothers. This book is so much fun, and it’s got a lot of twists and turns. It was a great sequel to The Strangers, and I can’t wait for the third book to come out.

I also read Circe by Madeline Miller. This was another book I started in April but didn’t finish before my library copy expired and had to get back on the waitlist. We were trying to get my Harvard Law School book club back together, virtually, to discuss this, which is why I picked it up, but that discussion never happened, sadly. Circe is a retelling of Greek mythology from Circe’s point of view. It goes through her entire life, from her birth and her childhood, to her exile, and so on. I don’t want to spoil it in case you don’t know the Greek mythology, if you do know the mythology, I’m sorry to say you know the whole book. Unfortunately, I was disappointed with Circe, especially because it’s gotten so many glowing reviews. Madeline Miller’s writing was very beautiful, if a tad melodramatic at times. But she didn’t add anything new to the story, and so it really dragged for me. I can see why people liked it, but it honestly just wasn’t for me.

Next, I read There There by Tommy Orange. This is a book that follows several Native American characters in modern-day Oakland, as they all prepare to attend a big powwow in Oakland. I’m ashamed to admit that aside from what I learned in elementary schools and the few books I read then, I know very little about modern-day Native American culture. I really enjoyed reading about all these different characters, but I admit that I got a bit lost because there were so many characters and they all connected in different ways. I also felt like it was a little too convenient how it all came together in the end. I did enjoy this book, but honestly literary fiction has to really wow me for me to recommend it to others, and this didn’t quite do that.

After that, I read Spark by Sarah Beth Durst. I started reading this in Braille but the electronic Braille version I had kept having whole sentences or parts of sentences missing, so I gave up and listened to it. Set in a world where children bond with dragon-like creatures called storm beasts and control the weather, Spark follows Mina, who is very quiet, and her new lightning beast, Pixit, as they learn to harness and control lightning. Mina struggles at the lightning school, because most lightning guardian teams are loud and obnoxious. She doesn’t feel like she fits in, a fact reenforced by her family’s perceptions of her, and she’s sure she’ll never be able to be a real storm guardian. But when Mina and Pixit learn the price of controlling the weather with their power, quiet Mina must learn to speak up. This was a really fun book. I loved watching Mina grow into the person she wants to be, and I just ador Pixit, who is like a dragon puppy. I would definitely recommend this book.

Then I finished Marissa Meyer’s Renegades series with Supernova. This was a great finale to this series. Everything comes to a head so nicely, and yes, a lot of it was still really predictable, but it was also a lot of fun. The only bit I didn’t like was the epilogue, which put a twist on everything and really didn’t feel like an ending at all. Now if there was going to be more content in the Renegades world, I’d be fine with it, but as it stands it didn’t work for me as an ending. Still, I really enjoyed the whole series.

After that, I reread the third Circle of Magic book, Daja’s Book by Tamora Pierce. I always love these books. They’re so much fun and really great to reread in times of stress. In Daja’s Book, the four young mages have traveled north with Sandry’s uncle, the duke, and their teachers to figure out how to help with a drought. Since they spun their magic together, the four’s magic has changed and is now getting out of control in some really weird ways, and they have to deal with that. Also forest fires. But the real joy of this book is how Daja has to confront her past and the people who cast her out after her family died in a shipwreck. When Daja accidentally creates a vine of living metal, a Trader caravan offers to buy it, and Daja gets to interact with her people for the first time in months. This is a really great book, and as I’ve said before, I really recommend this whole series.

I then took a break for something fun and silly and listened to Fantastic Mr. Fox and Other Animal Stories by Roald Dahl. This was a collection of a bunch of different short animal stories: Fantastic Mr. Fox, Esio Trot, The Enormous Crocodile, and The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me. We had this audiobook when I was a kid, and I remember listening to it on some car ride, but nothing else. This was quick and fun and very silly, which was really nice.

Finally, I read The Light Between Worlds by Laura E. Weymouth, and guys, this might be my favorite book of 2020 so far. The Light Between Worlds reminds me a lot of Narnia, but it’s everything I didn’t know I wanted from Narnia. The story is about three children who are whisked into a magical world in the middle of an air raid in World War II, and the book alternates between their adventures in the fantasy world and their lives five years after they’ve returned home. It particularly focuses on the youngest child, Evelyn, who grew up in the fantasy world and is really struggling back in our world. This is an absolutely beautiful book that just gave me so many feelings: It’s the sort of book that I have been not just recommending to everyone but buying for everyone too. You absolutely have to read this one!

And that’s it for April and May of this year. My plan is to have my June reading post up not too long after the end of June, because this is ridiculous. If you’ve read any of these books, I’d love to talk about them. And I hope some of these books might help you find some light in these dark times. Take care of yourselves, and I’ll be back soon.

Jameyanne Rereads Harry Potter 2019 Edition: Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows

Last week, I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, completing this year’s reread of the Harry Potter series. I have so enjoyed this reread, as I enjoy it every year, but I have particularly enjoyed writing down all my thoughts as I read the books and sharing those thoughts with you. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading them.

If you’re just joining in now, you can find my thoughts on Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets here and Prisoner of Azkaban, Goblet of Fire, and Order of the Phoenix here.

So here are my random thoughts on the last two books in the series. As always, there will be spoilers, so if you haven’t read the books and don’t want to be spoiled, stop reading now.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

I really love the opening chapter of this book, “The Other Minister.” It not only does an excellent job of catching the reader up on what has happened since Voldemort revealed himself at the ministry at the end of Order of the Phoenix and how the whole world has changed since then, but it also is just a great Muggle perspective of the wizarding world we have become so accustomed to by now. It’s a really great opening to the book.

“Spinner’s End” is also a great chapter, and I think it’s interesting whether you know or do not know the truth about Snape. The first time I read it, I definitely took it as confirmation of Snape actually being on Voldemort’s side, which I think was a big part of the point. Rereading it now that I know all the truth, it’s really cool to see how well Snape acts, particularly when you consider that Wormtail is living with him, and he must hate Wormtail as much as he hated Sirius (it was Wormtail, really, who got Lily killed after all). I do wonder about Wormtail’s presence though. He isn’t important to the rest of the plot of this book, so I kind of feel like he’s there to remind the reader that he exists before he reappears in the seventh book.

I love how everything about this book exudes a darker tone and how Harry and his friends are treated much more like adults. Like when Harry first arrives at the Burrow, the conversation he has with Molly Weasley while he’s eating soup is a much more adult conversation than any in previous books. Same goes for his feeling that he can confide his suspicions about Malfoy to Arthur. We see it in how Diagen Alley has changed too, and that everything at Hogwarts seems more tense. Poor Hannah Abbott!

This brings me to the point about the sixth book that annoys me. Harry just becomes obsessed with Draco Malfoy and what he’s up to, to the exclusion of everything else. For one thing, it feels like a repeat of the first book when they’re convinced that Snape is trying to steal the sorcerer’s stone, except this time there’s barely any proof that Malfoy is up to anything bad, at least for a good chunk of the book. And the problem isn’t so much that Harry is obsessed. The problem is that he’s right. It just irks me.

Harry also becomes an annoying person around the Half-Blood Prince’s potions book, and he winds up doing a lot of things that feel totally outside his character. Like in Order of the Phoenix he is really upset when he sees how his father bullied Snape and hears that his father walked around Hogwarts jinxing people who annoyed him. And in this book, Harry is totally fine with trying out the Prince’s pretty gruesome spells on Crabbe and Filch, just because he can. This is actually kind of an interesting point, because as annoying as I find it, it’s kind of a cool point to show how much Harry trusts Snape (the book actually makes this point at the end).

If Malfoy wasn’t in Hogsmeade because he was in detention, how did he put Madam Rosmerta under the imperius curse? I assume he used an accomplice, like Harry said when he, Ron, and Hermione are debating the necklace incident. But a lot of the specifics of how malfoy’s plan came together get answered in the end, and this doesn’t.

Another thing that annoys me about this book is that while it’s cool to learn about Voldemort’s past, it isn’t really an interesting backstory. He’s a sociopath. He’s been a sociopath for forever. Personally,I prefer villains who have a reason—even a bad reason—for being villains. But maybe that’s just me. That being said, eleven-year-old Voldemort is quite creepy.

Okay, so while I like a lot of the elements of this book, it doesn’t feel as well put together as the earlier books in the series, particularly in the middle. It’s just kind of messy.

I appreciate that Dumbledore gives Harry a talking to about not getting the memory. He deserved that one hundred percent.

Dumbledore and Voldemort’s meeting is really fascinating.

If I wrote fanfic, I would most definitely write the Slughorn Christmas Party between Tom Riddle leaving school and Voldemort showing his true colors in which it’s obvious to Dumbledore that he’s a bad guy, but they’ve both been invited and have to make civil conversation while actually hating each other.

So if I have my timeline right, which I may not, the defense against the dark arts job has been jinxed for like forty years? Wow.

Ugh I hate that Harry uses sectumsempra on Malfoy. I like it for the story, but I hate it for Harry. It makes me so uncomfortable and angry with him, which is totally the point.

A lot of people hate on the Harry and Ginny romantic pairing. I don’t hate it, but I don’t absolutely love it either. I think part of the reason why is that we don’t spend a lot of time with them as a couple to really get attached to it and be upset when Harry breaks it off to protect her. There’s also a lot of telling and not showing that happens both with the buildup to the relationship and the relationship itself. I know having characters be happy is hard to write, but instead of just saying over and over again that Harry is happier than he’s been in a while, show us. And while Ginny is certainly more developed in the books than the movies, she’s still always kept outside important things like knowledge about the prophecy and the horcruxes, and that all stops me from really getting behind their relationship.

I don’t really like Harry exploding at Dumbledore about Snape being the one who told Voldemort about the prophecy. It makes complete sense based on everything we know about Harry and Snape, but hasn’t he exploded at Dumbledore enough for the series?

I think after this reread, I would say Half-Blood Prince is probably my least favorite of the books, for all the reasons I’ve mentioned so far. I just don’t like hanging out with Harry as much when he’s so obsessive, I don’t like that he’s right, I think the plot is in general weaker, and I wish Voldemort’s backstory was more interesting and not just Voldemort was born evil and just became more evil.

That being said, the climax of this book is awesome and creepy and then terrifying and then heartbreaking, and it leads into the seventh book so well.

Speaking of, it’s a good thing none of the horcruxes they track down in the seventh book are protected the way the cave is. If they had to search through thin air for magic like Dumbledore does, they would never get there.

I know Dumbledore drinking the potion is more dramatic, but seriously would it be against Voldemort’s cave rules to fill the cup with potion and just dump it on the ground or vanish it once it’s in the cup or whatever?

Malfoy must be good at the imperius curse to keep Rosmerta acting so normally all the time. Harry doesn’t do so well himself in the seventh book.

This must be a really interesting book from Dumbledore’s perspective, because he spent a lot of time this year trying to keep Harry off Malfoy and Snape’s trail—not that he does a very good job of it—but still.

This is another one of those endings where I hope every time that it will be different.

The end of this book is a little like a recap of the whole series, which works really well as a lead into the seventh book, which ditches the school-year formula the first six books have followed.

And I just love that Ron and Hermione continue to stand with Harry all the way.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

The first chapter of this book is so, so creepy. It sets the tone well. And I love how from then on, things just take off and don’t stop.

I always wondered why Harry, Ron, and Hermione didn’t bring at least one cauldron with them. Like it wouldn’t have been that farfetched that they would need to make some potions.

HEDWIG!!!! Why? I mean, I know why, don’t answer that. But it makes me so, so sad! Poor Hedwig!

And Moody! It’s wild how so much of us getting attached to Moody happened in the fourth book when he wasn’t Moody. But losing him is still just so awful!

So when Hermione is sorting books, she puts Numerology and Grammatica on one pile of books and The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts on the other, and I can’t figure out which pile she put which on. Again, I wish I knew more about arithmancy. Also why in the world is she indecisive about Break with a Banshee? Trash it already.

Not a big deal but I always wondered what happened to Crookshanks and Pigwidgeon when the three go off on their quest for horcruxes.

I would love to know Mrs. Weasley’s feelings on Harry and Ginny and the fact that they were dating and are now broken up.

I love how J. K. Rowling keeps the tension up through the scenes at the Burrow and on to the wedding and the aftermath. Things just continue to be really tense even when they’re in Grimauld Place trying to find the locket. And of course the sequence at the Ministry is just great.

It’s never quite clear to me if the reason the Death Eaters are hanging out outside Grimauld Place is because they know Harry owns the house or because they’ve been saying Voldemort’s name. You’d think there would be more out there if it was because they were saying the name. Because they would know for sure that they were in there.

Also when did Ron start saying Voldemort’s name? He was always so strongly against it, and all of a sudden he’s saying it.

Kreacher’s tale is horrifying.

I’m really curious why any muggle borns would turn themselves in to the Ministry for questioning. Like they at least should be aware of muggle history, right? Whatever the reason, the interrogation of muggleborns scene is really scary.

I really hope the Cattermoles made it out of the Ministry. I want to know what happened to them.

Also, I’m curious if Mr.Weasley puts two and two together and realizes that he wasn’t talking to Runcorn once he knows that there were intruders in the Ministry.

And of course, Umbridge is the worst.

The thing I love about the sequence in the Ministry is that it calls back so much to the fifth book. It’s yet another example of just how well put-together these books are.

A week or so ago, while we were playing trivia, I was talking with my friends about wizarding religion. Wizards celebrate Christmas, but it’s very secular. There is Easter break, but there isn’t any celebration of Easter beyond Mrs. Weasley sending the kids Easter eggs. Usually the Easter holidays is the time when the schoolwork ramps up, and we get into the climax of the book. But it was never religious. Students didn’t usually go home (Deathly Hallows is the exception and who can blame them), and there wasn’t even Easter dinner at Hogwarts. So there really isn’t a lot of religion in the wizarding world. There’s possibly some religion at Dumbledore’s funeral and at Bill and Fleur’s wedding, but the line between magical ceremonies and religious ceremonies is blurry. On the other hand, when Harry buries Moody’s eye, he marks the tree with a cross. I wonder if that’s a wizarding thing or if it’s because of Harry’s muggle upbringing.

And now we come to the point that seems most contentious, at least in my circle of Harry Potter fans: the time they spend in the tent. I know so many people who dislike this book for this segment, even call it Harry Potter and the Neverending Camping Trip. I admit that things can be a bit slow at this point in the book, but I don’t dislike it. The truth is they don’t know where the other horcruxes are, they’re in real danger all the time, they’re struggling to find food, and feeling isolated from the rest of the wizarding world and abandoned by Dumbledore. This is really important to their journey throughout the rest of the book. Cutting away from Harry’s point of view at this point and showing us what’s going on in the rest of the wizarding world wouldn’t, as a couple of friends think, solve the problem. For one thing, it feels like a cheat to get away from a part of the book that I imagine was difficult to write and certainly isn’t the easiest to get through. We’ve never left Harry’s point of view in the middle of the book before except in his visions of Voldemort, which are still his point of view, and those couple of times in the first book when we got Ron’s and Hermione’s perspectives during the quidditch games for some reason. So cutting away from Harry now would feel unnatural, and personally it would have annoyed me as a reader. Second, and I’ve expressed this view before, I hate it when the reader knows things that the main characters don’t—unless there’s some deliberate dramatic irony thing going on. It would make it much harder to connect with Harry and his feelings of isolation and abandonment if we, the readers, know what’s going on out there. So no, the tent isn’t the best part of the book, , but it’s an important part of the book. Rant over.

Actually, not quite over, because this is the part where I tell you of my vision of a Netflix original adaptation of the Harry Potter books. I think in that form, we could see more of the wider wizarding world throughout the course of the whole story and it would feel much more natural than it would in the books. Also, like, Netflix originals are so good I would love to see them adapt the Harry Potter books.

I’m so mad at Ron for leaving, but it feels totally natural. Remember Goblet of Fire?

Okay, so they can’t make good fooc out of nothing, but they can visit supermarkets and they have a bag of holding. So why don’t they buy enough food to last a while? Like once they realize this is a problem, they should plan ahead.

The Godric’s Hollow sequence is great every time. So many feelings. So terrifying.

I get that Harry has doubts about Dumbledore, but I’m always surprised that the source of those doubts is Rita Skeeter, after how she twisted the truth about Harry, Hermione, and Hagrid back in Goblet of Fire. Okay, so some of what Rita wrote about was true, like Hagrid was half-giant, and Harry’s scar did hurt him, but most of it was completely made up or so twisted it was unrecognizable. Hermione reminds Harry of this a couple times when they’re talking about Dumbledore, but it never occurs to Harry that Rita Skeeter might just be wrong. Okay so there’s no skating around the for-the–greater-good letter between Dumbledore and Grindlewald, but on the other hand who’s to say Rita Skeeter couldn’t fake that too? I’m just saying while I understand that Harry has doubts about Dumbledore throughout the course of this book, and it’s perfectly natural and a really good character journey for him, I wish he didn’t accept Rita Skeeter’s version of events so readily.

Ron’s totably right. Why didn’t Harry take the horcrux off before diving into the pond? It seems like a stupid move given that they know the horcrux can be sort of alive at times. A sentence explanation could solve this problem.

I like the bits when both Harry and Hermione express frustration with their new wands, because they don’t work right. Only aside from complaining, they generaally seem to do fine with them.

Xenophilius Lovegood is heartbreaking. He just wants to save Luna. Also awful because he betrays Harry but still heartbreaking.

Not gonna lie, I would love to see the scene when the Death Eaters take Luna off the Hogwarts Express. Was the train stopped halfway back to London? Do Ginny and Neville and other members of Dumbledore’s Army put up a fight? Or did the Death Eaters wait until they got to Kings Cross and grab her on the platform or even out in the muggle station when she was alone?

Of all the encounters they’ve had with Death Eaters so far, the sequence at Malfoy Manor is by far the most terrifying.

DOBBY!!! NO!!! I cry every time, particularly when Harry writes “Here lies Dobby, a free elf” on the headstone. I’m crying now just writing about it. Poor Dobby!

Harry says that the Death Eaters will know that Hermione snapped his wand by using priori incantatem, and okay, maybe, but that was months ago, and she’s been doing that set of protective spells every day since (or almost every day, since harry complains his wand doesn’t work as well). Would the Death Eaters really have the patience to wade back through all that magic to get there? I feel like they should be more worried about the fact that the Death Eaters will know what their protective spells are. The Death Eaters could certainly deduce that Harry doesn’t have the phoenix feather wand anymore, given that none of the wands taken from Harry, Ron, and Hermione match Olivander’s description.

Once you hit Gringotts in this book, it’s sort of the point of no return. You can’t stop.

I love how so much of the Gringotts break-in harkens back to the earlier books, particularly the first book when everything was so happy and innocent.

I love the scene in the room of requirement. It really ties everything together so nicely. And it’s really fun seeing everyone back together.

The battle of Hogwarts is the most epic.

FRED!!!

I don’t know why but the image of Professor Trelawney throwing crystal balls at Death Eaters has always been really funny to me.

I feel silly, but this is the first time when I actually realized the moment when Ron looks for Crookshanks to stop the whomping willow so they can get through to the shrieking shack and Hermione says “Are you a wizard or what?” is a callback to the moment when Hermione panics over the devil’s snare in the first book and looks for wood to start a fire and Ron says “Are you a witch or what?” I love it!

Lupin! Tonks! Nooo!

The sequence of Snape’s memories is probably one of my favorite sequences in the whole series. I know there’s a lot of debate around this. Snape is a horrible, abusive person to Harry, and he should in no way be forgiven for that. I don’t get behind the idea that he was a stalker to Lily. I read this chapter as he genuinely loved her. And it’s all just so sad!

Pause for a small anecdote: When these books were first coming out, it always took almost a month for the Braille version to be printed and shipped after the print version had come out. So I had the fourth, fifth, and sixth books spoiled for me (when I started the series, the first three had already been published). For the seventh book, National Braille Press was able to work things out with the publisher so they could have an advance copy and the Braille book was on my doorstep by 10:00 AM of release day. Still, my older brother got it at midnight, so by noon or 1:00 or something, he was already finished, and I was still in the beginning middle when he called me. Now we’d been having a longstanding debate about whether Harry was going to die or not. My older brother was positive Harry was going to die. I vehemently objected to the idea, and I used the fact that Voldemort took Harry’s blood as proof. So my older brother calls me up on Deathly Hallows release day, and he’s finished the book, and I haven’t, and all I want is to discover it myself and not be spoiled. And he says, “Jameyanne, we were both right.” And before he could say more I hung up. So I got through Deathly Hallows without being spoiled, and yes, we were both right.

Colin!

Actually I have something to say about Colin dying beyond just wailing. I’ve mentioned this before in other posts, but i feel like by the time we get to Colin, it’s just too much, and it doesn’t matter, and it should. I don’t know. Like this all should be messy and people should die, because otherwise it doesn’t mean anything, and it’s unrealistic if it’s all so clean and neat, but it just feels like too much death around this point (though admittedly that depends on the mood I’m in when I’m reading this particular sequence).

Harry’s walk into the forest is just so tense and full of feelings.

The quote “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” has always been one of my favorites in the series. But then again, I’m one of those people with whole worlds in my head, and I totally approve of the idea that they are still real.

There are just so many amazing epic moments after Harry comes back. Neville! Oh Neville is just great! And Molly is amazing!

Just one question though, how does Bellatrix know that Fred is dead? She wasn’t there. Is there like some running Death Eater score board or something we don’t know about?

The first time I read this, I wished for a more climactic duel between Harry and Voldemort. Now I think it’s perfect. Harry honestly doesn’t have the skill to battle Voldemort, Voldemort isn’t interested in a protracted fight, and Harry taunting Voldemort with what he knows and Voldemort doesn’t understand is all amazing. Particularly when you contrast this with all Harry’s previous encounters with Voldemort, when he’s always been on the defensive and been terrified. It’s just a great moment of realizing the character development.

Voldemort referring to himself in the third person is always just kind of funny to me. Like it’s not a funny scene at all, but whenever Voldemort says something like “Lord Voldemort is happy,” or “Lord Voldemort is angry,” or “how can you dream of knowing more than Lord Voldemort” (these are not exact quotes), I crack up.

Oh I just love this ending! All of it! But especially Peeves!

I know a lot of people hate the epilogue. But I like it.

Every time I finish this series, I always need to take some time to mourn the fact that it’s over. But I’ll always be able to go back and reread them again next year.

Jameyanne Rereads Harry Potter, 2019 Edition: Prisoner of Azkaban, Goblet of Fire, and Order of the Phoenix

Last week, I talked about my thoughts as I reread the first two Harry Potter books. This week, I’m going to share my thoughts on the next three books in the series, Prisoner of Azkaban, Goblet of Fire, and Order of the Phoenix, which I reread in January and February.

Quick reminder, there will be spoilers in these posts, and if you don’t want to be spoiled for whatever reason, you shouldn’t read this.

I love all the different ways you can group the Harry Potter books. For example, my initial plan for these posts was to talk about the first three books in one post, then books four and five, then books six and seven. This would group the three shorter books, which are commonly thought of as middle grade books together. Things get darker in books four and five, but in some sense they’re sort of transition books as Voldemort gains strength and returns to power but stays hidden in the shadows. And then I would talk about the sixth and seventh book as the climax and wrap-up of the series with the wizarding world’s second war. I changed this plan because my post for the first three books would have been really long. But once I rethought where I split the books, this also seemed a natural split. The first two books introduce us to the wizarding world, the characters, the villain, the plot (including details that will definitely come back in the later books). In the third book, we really dive into the circumstances around Harry’s parents’ murder and the fall of Voldemort, and of course Wormtail escaping at the end paves the way for the fourth book. In the fourth book, Harry is kind of a puppet in Voldemort’s plan, which succeeds. And in the fifth book, Harry is fighting to get people to believe what happened. These three books also follow Harry’s relationship with Sirius, and Prisoner of Azkaban is the first book in which Harry’s victory is not absolute (and it only goes downhill from there). There are certainly other ways you could group the books: 1 and 2, 3 and 4, and then 5 6 and 7; or 1 2 3 4 and then 5 6 7; or 1 2 3 and then 4 5 6 7; or anything else you can think of. You could even group 2 and 6 together, or 1 and 5. There’s so much in these books I’m sure you could find all manner of reasons to group them any way you want. I chose my organization scheme because it fit well with three mid-length posts.

So let’s dive in.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

I’ll say from the get-go that this may be one of my favorite books in the series. It goes back and forth between this book and the fourth book. I love this one so much! It’s so tightly plotted (everything is important to the plot here). It deals with the larger plot of the series with all the Voldemort stuff and yet it’s still really fun and innocent (compared to what comes next). And there are just so many feelings everywhere. This book really feels like the time when Harry is starting to grow up more, and I love it. If people were to ask me what’s the sort of book you would want to write, I would say Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

Also fair warning, last time I read this I was taking notes to write a paper on multiparty negotiations in this book for my multiparty negotiations course. The thesis boils down to Lupin is awesome. But don’t be surprised if some of that theory pops up in these comments.

Re: my comment last week about a whole bunch of characters missing big chunks of the school year in Chamber of Secrets, I think it’s possible the professors give them summer homework to catch everybody up. I’m almost positive the only other time homework is mentioned over the summer is in Chamber of Secrets, when Hermione tells Ron and Harry she’s been busy with schoolwork, and Ron is horrified because it’s the summer.

As Harry opens his first ever birthday cards and presents from his friends at the start of this book, I do wonder about everybody else’s birthdays. I know we can’t be celebrating birthdays constantly, and Ron’s comes up in the sixth book when he’s poisoned, and Hermione buys Crookshanks as an early birthday present for herself, but it would be nice to see Ron’s and Hermione’s birthdays recognized for fun, or to see how birthdays are handled at Hogwarts.

Aunt Marge is an awful person and she totally deserved to get blown up.

Interesting thing that I knew subliminally but just put into words as I’m reading today: Lupin knows that dementors make you relive your worst memories, so when Harry says that he heard someone screaming on the train, Lupin probably has a good idea of what’s going on. I love Lupin.

Trelawney may be a fraud, but almost everything that is predicted in the first divination class comes true, even the things that Harry and Ron predict about each other. Also, why doesn’t Trelawney repair Neville’s broken teacup with magic?

Hermione is a really good liar. Like when Ron is questioning her about her wacky schedule, she is totally cool about it. I could not do this.

I don’t quite get why Malfoy is able to get away with faking his injury for so long. We all know Madam Pomfrey can mend cuts really easily, so I don’t see how he could get away with it for so long. Like okay the ministry could still have gone after Buckbeak even without Malfoy having his arm in a sling for months, but why do the Hogwarts teachers put up with it?

Something else I have always wondered, when Sirius Black is sighted not far from Hogwars, I really want to know why he let himself be seen. Like why be a human at all? It’s not a big deal but I’m curious.

I really like the reading of the scene where Harry asks McGonagall for permission to go into Hogsmeade that McGonagall would have let him go if not for Sirius Black. She did some spying on the Dursleys back in Sorcerer’s Stone and probably has a decent sense of what Harry’s up against with them.

I just want to pause to note that Harry is just having a really bad year. Maybe that’s why I like this book so much: the tension keeps building and things go from bad to worse for everything that Harry cares about and he has so many feelings I just love it. Also Lupin is the best.

Is it me or is Harry’s schedule really inconsistent in this book? Unless I was wrong in my earlier comment that September 1 is always a Sunday because classes always start on a Monday. Right now, I’m pretty sure at first Harry was going to divination, transfiguration, and care of magical creatures on Mondays, but in November he also has defense against the dark arts on Mondays. I recognize that now I’m just being really nitpicky.

Okay, I feel stupid. It took me two and a half years of law school to realize that when Harry, Ron, and Hermione are helping Hagrid build a defense for Buckbeak, they’re doing legal research. They’re looking up precedent and building arguments around that precedent. I am once again impressed by Hermione’s brains—I doubt it was Harry and Ron’s idea. I definitely did not know how to do this at thirteen. Sometimes I doubt I know how to do it now (just kidding).

I’ve always wished that Harry took arithmancy, because I really want to know what it is and how it works and what it does in the real world. Like we never actually find out in any of the books.

Every time I read this I always tear up when Harry and the team finally win the Quidditch Cup. There’s just something so great about that whole sequence in the books.

I always have a lot of fun with the climax of this book. It is so great in so many ways, but it’s also one of those sequences that has so many moving parts that it’s really fun to imagine how it would all change if one part changed. For example, what if they stayed at Hagrid’s to argue for Buckbeak? What if Dumbledore came with them to the Shrieking Shack? Or what if Harry, Ron, and Hermione made it back to the castle with Scabbers before Sirius caught up with them, but they met Lupin instead? How would it have played out if, instead of Lupin transforming and Pettigrew escaping, the whole group made it back to the castle to talk to Dumbledore? None of these scenarios, on their face, are as climactic as the scene in the Shrieking Shack, that fight with the dementors, and the sequence with the Time Turner, so obviously that all wins, but it’s a lot of fun to imagine how those scenes would go and how, as a writer, I might craft those alternate climaxes for maximum effect.

Why didn’t Lupin see the second Harry and Hermione on the map? Okay, I can see if he’s paying attention to Harry, Ron, and Hermione as they go down to Hagrid’s he might not notice any of the other hundred or so dots moving around, but Harry and Hermione from the future are retracing past Harry, Ron, and Hermione’s steps, so I feel like he would notice them. Of course, two Harry Potters could just break the map’s brain.

I know that there are all sorts of rules about not being seen when you go back in time with the Time Turner, but Hermione knows that she has a Time Turner, so I can imagine that she wouldn’t necessarily freak out and think there was dark magic afoot, which would allow Hermione to team up with her future self to do cool things. Or anyone with a Time Turner really. It kind of makes my head hurt to think about the logistics, but it seems like it would be a cool way to double your manpower.

Ugh the ending of this book gives me so many feelings and I love it. It’s the sort of book I’m sad to close, because I don’t want it to end, which is one of the highest compliments I can give a book.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

This is a close second to Prisoner of Azkaban for my favorite. They’re so close that sometimes this one edges out Prisoner of Azkaban. Sometimes.

The thing that I really like about all the Harry Potter books, but Prisoner of Azkaban and Goblet of Fire in particular, is how you can use them as examples for so many different aspects of writing a story. For example, I’m a big fan of how Goblet of Fire is put together—how much is going on and how it is orchestrated. Specifically, right now I’m looking at the first chapter. It’s practically a prologue, along the same lines as the first chapters of Sorcerer’s Stone and Deathly Hallows and the first two chapters of Half-Blood Prince. The first chapter of Goblet of Fire is masterful at this. It’s specific enough to tell a story, but it’s vague enough to leave you guessing for the rest of the book. At the same time, the vagueness feels natural. Voldemort and Wormtail’s conversation doesn’t feel like they’re deliberately skating the issue so the reader won’t know what’s coming. It feels like they’re having a normal conversation—or at least as normal a conversation as you can have with Lord Voldemort.

Another thing that I like about Goblet of Fire is that you dive right into the plot with that first chapter and then with Harry’s scar hurting and the Death Eater activity at the quidditch world cup. It takes a long time for them to get back to Hogwarts and for Harry’s name to come out of the goblet—about half the book actually—but it’s not wasted time.

Look, if you’re going to eat grapefruit as a means of dieting, you should just eat the whole grapefruit. Eating a quarter of a grapefruit is an awful lot of work for like twenty calories. That is not a sufficient breakfast, whatever kind of diet you’re trying. Note that I love grapefruit and carrot sticks and everything Uncle Vernon calls rabit food, and as much as I had fun reading The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook last year, I was pretty horrified by the way the characters regularly ate. But I am getting very sidetracked. My point is grapefruit is good; you should eat all of it.

Okay so the scene with the Weaselys and the Dursleys continues to be laugh-out-loud funny. But also a little horrifying, because if Mr. Weasley hadn’t held Harry back to get the Dursleys to say goodbye to him, they might have all been gone before Dudley ate the toffee.

I wonder what Charlie, who works with dragons, thinks about Bill wearing dragon-skin boots.

I’ve always wondered about Ron’s frog. Does it have a name? What happened to it?

Amos Digory mentions the Lovegoods going to the world cup, and I have a really hard time imagining Luna and her father at the world cup. Not that they don’t like Quidditch or anything, but it seems so normal, and they’re… the Lovegoods.

Okay, I lied earlier when I said September first is always a sunday. September 1 is a Monday in Goblet of Fire. But it’s definitely a Sunday in Order of the Phoenix, so the point still stands. And when they get to Hogwarts in Goblet of Fire they start classes on a Monday, even though two days ago it was Sunday. This is obviously not an important thing but it bugs me so much guys.

Did Dumbledore also mention that they don’t use charms, potions, or herbology as a punishment? It seems oddly specific that he would just tell Moody they don’t use transfiguration as a punishment. “Draco Malfoy the incredible bouncing ferret” is such a great scene, and I just like to imagine the conversation between Moody and Dumbledore when Dumbledore tells him specifically that they can’t use transfiguration as a punishment. Maybe Moody has a history of this sort of thing.

The tension leading up to the announcement of the champions is fantastic. I don’t know how many times I’ve read this book, but the scene in the great hall with the goblet spitting out the names gets me every time. It’s so powerful that every time I think maybe this time it will go differently. Of course it doesn’t.

The one thing about this book that I really don’t like is that it’s never really explained why Harry has to compete in the tournament once his name comes out of the goblet. What does a binding magical contract mean? What are the consequences if you break it? Is it like the unbreakable vow and you die? Or do you go to wizarding contracts court and argue that it isn’t a contract because there was no offer, acceptance, and consideration between the goblet and Harry, and anyway it would be unconscionable to force Harry to compete? (Huh, I guess I did learn something in contracts after all.) The point is, everybody keeps saying he has to compete, hee has to compete, they can’t get him out of it even though no one wants him to compete, and this would feel more realistic and more tense if the consequences of him just saying “no way” were clear.

Basically everything from Harry’s name coming out of the goblet up through the first task is so great. I love how the tension is so thick you can taste it. I always get super worked up about what’s going on. And then we get a well-timed break before things get crazy again with preparation for the second task onward. Not that the stuff that happens between the first and second tasks isn’t important, it’s just much less stressful.

I really love the casual way Neville just turns into a canary after the first task. It’s great.

DOBBY!!!

I always wonder how much information sharing is going on between Sirius and Dumbledore at this point in the book. Does Sirius tell Dumbledore that Harry saw Crouch on the map? It would explain how Dumbledore figured out Moody was actually Barty Crouch Jr. (I’ll come back to my forever confusion on that point later on), but I don’t think Sirius told Dumbledore about the map, because when Barty Jr. mentions the map later on, Dumbledore doesn’t know about it. Also, we learn later on (from Snape’s memories that we see in Deathly Hallows), that Dumbledore knows about the Dark Marks on the Death Eaters’ forearms and they’re getting stronger, but when Harry tells Sirius about Karkaroff showing Snape something on his arm, Sirius has no idea what that’s about. I’m not sure if the characters could have put everything together before all the bad stuff goes down if they’d sat down and had a good info sharing and brainstorming session, but they might have gotten closer.

So Dumbledore figures out that Moody isn’t Moody. Okay, I’m with him so far. But before Moody transforms into Barty Crouch Jr., Dumbledore has Snape go down to the kitchens to get Winky. It’s possible that he just thought whoever Moody was would tell them what happened to Mr. Crouch, but it’s almost like he knows who fake Moody really is before the Polyjuice potion wears off. He certainly doesn’t show surprise at fake Moody’s identity or even that Barty Jr. is still alive. But I just don’t get how he figured it out.

And then I just took a day to finish the whole book and had all the feelings. Oh god this book makes me cry. Every. Single. Time.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

This, like Chamber of Secrets, is one of those books that I appreciate a lot more now than I did when I first read it. Harry is so angsty this book, and it’s annoying. But when you read it right after Goblet of Fire, instead of waiting the years we did for it to come out when we were kids, it’s a lot more understandable. It’s only been a month since Voldemort killed Cedric in front of Harry and tried to kill him. In that month, he’s pretty much been totally isolated from the wizarding world—even his friends haven’t been telling him much—and when he comes back to the wizarding world, he’s still being kept in the dark and he’s facing most people not believing him. Not only not believing him, but actively attacking him. And he has serious PTSD, which was illustrated really well by the fact that when he’s attacked by the Dementors, he doesn’t hear his parents’ deaths anymore. He hears Voldemort taunting him in the graveyard. What happened at the end of Goblet of Fire is now Harry’s worst memory.

I have always wondered what a Budgerigar is, but it’s not important to the story, so I usually just keep reading. This time around, I finally googled it. It’s an Australian parakeet. Huh. Now I know why it’s news that a budgerigar learned to water-ski. That’s very important news indeed. Moving on.

Why do some people apparate with a pop and some people apparate with a loud crack? I’m pretty sure this is never explained.

I love how Mrs. Figg uses all the wizard idioms in the one conversation we have with her. It’s great.

This is the first book we don’t get a full summary of how Harry’s parents died and why he’s famous and that he’s a wizard and everything. We get information about the past books, but it’s woven into the action much more seamlessly. I think it makes sense. Up to book 4, you probably could pick up any of the books in the series and follow along reasonably well without having read the other books. But past the point when Voldemort returns, if you don’t already know the story you’re kind of lost anyway.

It always astounds me that characters like Tonks and Luna, who become so important to the series, are only introduced in book 5. I always think they must have come up sooner, but nope. They join the plot in Order of the Phoenix.

So if they can’t take down the screaming picture of Sirius’s mother, have they tried ways to keep the curtains permanently shut so she won’t scream at them constantly? Just my random thought.

Also, I would love to see the scene where Mrs. Weasley finds out that Harry, Ron, and Hermione have been communicating with Sirius in secret for a year. She handled it pretty well when he appeared at the end of Goblet of Fire, as in she stopped screaming when Ron said it was okay, but I imagine that was not the end of that discussion.

It struck me in this book that Dean Thomas is the only one of the students we meet who was raised by muggles but who also holds on to some of his muggle identity. Every year he puts up muggle soccer posters around his bed and in this book it mentions he has pajamas in his soccer team’s colors. Harry, Hermione, and Colin Creevey all pretty much abandon their muggle identities—understandable for Harry, at least, but interesting to think about for the other characters. And it makes me really curious about Dean.

Umbridge is such a great villain. I often rate her higher than Voldemort on my favorite villains list (yes, I have one of those), because while Voldemort is scary, he’s kind of generically scary. Umbridge is the kind of villain you just love to hate. I still remember how viscerally I reacted to her making Harry cut open his own hand and write “I must not tell lies” in his own blood the first time I read the book, and I still have that reaction. It’s smaller, but somehow more sadistic, than Voldemort’s torture.

I think everything with Dumbledore’s Army might just be my favorite part of this book.

Umbridge says the ministry would want Snape to remove the strengthening solution from the potions syllabus. What in the world does that potion strengthen?

I really appreciate how thoughtful and emotionally intelligent Hermione is in this book. It really shows as they’re planning Dumbledore’s Army and talking about Sirius and Harry and Cho. I’m not saying she wasn’t those things in the previous books, but I think it comes out a lot more in this book and shows how she’s matured as a character, especially since the fourth book.

Taking notes like this as I read, I’m noticing just how much changes in the fifth book. I already mentioned we don’t get the “previously on Harry Potter…” bit at the beginning. This is also the first book where nothing happens on Halloween, and we lose Quidditch as an important part of the plot as well (more on that in a second). And these changes persist into the later books. You can definitely tell things are getting darker.

DOBBY!!!

The thing with Harry beating up Malfoy and getting banned from playing quidditch always really bugged me. I wish there had been more internal build-up with Harry’s thoughts and feelings in the moments leading up to him snapping like that. Intellectually, I know it’s probably all the things boiling over at this moment, but we don’t see it, and in the past Malfoy has definitely said worse and Harry’s just brushed it off. I think this is the moment, during this reread of the book, when I lose a lot of sympathy for Harry’s feelings. It’s definitely a good plot point, and Umbridge continues to be the worst—really, the worst—but also, come on Harry, show a little restraint, please. No? No? Okay fine no more Quidditch for you.

I really want to know how Hagrid and Madame Maxime carried a branch of everlasting fire across two countries to bring it to the giants. I know, the answer is probably “magic,” but I want to know how.

So J. K. Rowling does this great thing where she brings something up early in the book and then it comes back in a way that has nothing to do with how it first came up. I particularly love it when she does it for a chapter title. A small amount of explanation before I clarify what I’m talking about. I’m the sort of person who likes to read the table of contents before I jump into a book, because I like chapter titles. I remember, when my older brother got Goblet of Fire the day it came out, and I had to wait a few weeks to get it in Braille, I got him to read me the table of contents out loud. That was what I asked for. Another importans fact is that the Braille editions of Harry Potter are broken into volumes, because Braille is so much bigger than print. The fifth book is thirteen volumes (I have a whole wall of Harry Potter in my bedroom). So at the start of each volume is the table of contents for that volume, so I usually read that before I start on that volume. So earlier in the fifth book, Malfoy brings up St. Mungo’s and the closed ward. And so the chapter titles “St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries” and “Christmas on the Closed Ward” always made me think that Harry was going to be sent to St. Mungo’s. Obviously, that’s not what happened, but I loved the effect Malfoy’s reference to St. Mungo’s and then reading the chapter titles again when I got to them two or three volumes later had on me. This is probably entirely a Jameyanne phenomenon, but it happens a couple other times in the books (can’t think of them right now), so I wanted to share.

Oh wow Harry’s date with Cho is so awkward. So awkward. He isn’t as emotionally stupid as Ron, but he really makes a mess of things. Cho is pretty awful though as well, to be fair. I mean, it’s so obvious that Harry doesn’t like what’s going on and she’s pulling all this on him. It definitely feels realistic to me, but it’s still a painful scene to read.

I will forever love the whole sequence in the Department of Mysteries. It is epic!

I will also forever be mad about the two-way mirror. I know it’s important later, and I guess it makes sense why Harry didn’t open it before, but this is definitely one of those times when a character does something totally stupid and that’s what caused everything to go horribly wrong. And I kind of hate it when authors do that. In this case, it’s not even an important stupid thing. He just never opened it and forgot about it.

All in all, this is a book I appreciate more and more as I get older. It’s not one of my favorites of the series, but it is a good book, and so much great stuff happens.

And that’s it for these three books. I haven’t finished rereading Deathly Hallows yet, but I’ll be back soon with my thoughts on Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows.

Jameyanne Rereads Harry Potter, 2019 edition: Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets

Every year I reread the Harry Potter books. I’m a nerd like that. And every year, I discover something new.

Recently, a friend suggested that I write down my thoughts during my yearly reread and do a blog post about them. She may have been joking, but I’m running with it.

This year, I reread the Harry Potter books starting just after finals in December 2018 and through April 2019 (I’m actually not finished with my reread yet but I’m planning to finish this month). I took my time with this reread, savoring the books instead of hurtling through them at my usual breakneck reading speed. This was a particularly fun reread, because at the same time I was reading the first two books, I was also reading The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook, which really made me focus on the food in the series. Also, in my middle grade space adventure novel, my main characters are listening to the audiobooks when they’re having downtime in the plot—the Jim Dale version, of course. This may be cut from the final draft, but right now I’m having a lot of fun interpreting the Harry Potter books from a time when interplanetary space travel is common and the books are considered classics, akin to Shakespeare.

I’m breaking up my thoughts on the Harry Potter books into three posts. This week, I’m talking about Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets. Next week, I’ll talk about Prisoner of Azkaban, Goblet of Fire, and Order of the Phoenix. And the week after that, assuming I’ve finished reading them, I will talk about Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows. These posts are not reviews like my other posts. I will write spoiler-free reviews at some point in the future (probably for next year’s reread). These posts will be my thoughts and notes as I read the entire book, so there will be spoilers. All the spoilers. If you have not read the Harry Potter books and plan to in the future and don’t want to be spoiled in what will probably be a very confusing way, these are not the posts for you. If you have no interest in the inner workings of my brain while I’m reading these books, these are also not the posts for you. You have been warned.

Also, I ask a lot of questions in these thoughts. I’m sure there are answers out there on the web, especially on Pottermore, but I’m generally confining these posts to what’s contained in the books themselves. Also last I checked (admittedly a few years ago, thanks law school), Pottermore wasn’t all that accessible with a screenreader.

So without further ado, here is what struck me as I reread Harry potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of secrets this year.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Since I was living in the query trenches for my own novel when I started rereading this book, I was struck by the first chapter of the first book. I never thought much about the first chapter, which I always viewed as more of a prologue. But this time as I was reading it I was really dissecting what the point was. And I’m not sure there is a point other than to be mysterious. Everything that is introduced in the first chapter is introduced again in the subsequent chapters in a much more dynamic and developed way, and the second chapter is a more intriguing place to start the book. We all know that J. K. Rowling was rejected a lot before she got a book deal—this is like the thing that nonwriters quote at me whenever I said I was trying to get an agent—but this is the first time I really considered why that might be the case. When you submit a book, you usually submit a query letter and the first few pages, maybe the first chapter. And I can definitely see, because I’ve done it myself now, why the first Harry Potter book would get rejected so much. Don’t get me wrong, I love the first book to pieces, but the opening could have been a lot stronger.

So Dumbledore has a scar above his knee that’s an exact map of the london underground. Which makes me wonder: Does he reference that?

I really admire how so much of what happens in Diagon Alley isn’t just important for world building but is also setup for later in this book and later in the series. I really admire when a writer puts things together so well, and that’s one of the things I love about this series is just how well everything comes together.

I just love little innocent eleven-year-old Harry.

I don’t think we ever learn what the point of studying astronomy is. I’m all for studying astronomy, but every other class connects in some way to magic and this one doesn’t. Astrology comes up later in divination but that’s always treated as a joke. So what is the point of astronomy?

Why couldn’t Snape just heal his leg with magic after Fluffy bites it? Or go to Madam Pomphrey? Or get Dumbledore to do it if he doesn’t want anyone else to know?

When they’re looking for Nicholas Flammel, my first thought is that muggle-borns nowadays, used to google and smartphones, would be in for a nasty shock when they go to Hogwarts and there isn’t even electricity. I’m not even sure there’s a card catalogue for the Hogwarts library—at least it’s never mentioned. I would totally read the story about a muggle-born going to Hogwarts in 2019 and having to abandon their iPhone.

When I was a kid, it always really impressed me how Ron knew what the winged key would look like by looking for one that matches the handle. It must be a visual thing that keys match locks, which of course I wouldn’t have noticed as a kid, but even then as a twelve-year-old under pressure I don’t think I would have made the connection like that.

I love the potions logic problem. It reminds me of an LSAT logic problem, and I honest to goodness loved those. I try to diagram it every time I read it, but I’ve never managed to get it myself. I always got stuck with how to figure out which one of the end bottles lets you go forward and which one lets you go back. And I know, as someone who was just talking about the wonders of Google, maybe I should have looked it up. But I was determined that one of these days I would figure it out. And this year, I finally got it. In case anybody else has been as mystified as me, here’s how to do it.

First, here’s the riddle:

Danger lies before you, while safety lies behind,

Two of us would help you, whichever you would find,

One among us seven will let you move ahead,

Another will transport the drinker back instead,

Two among our number hold only nettle wine,

Three of us are killers, waiting hidden in line.

Choose, unless you wish to stay here forevermore,

To help you in your choice, we give you these clues four:

First, however slyly the poison tries to hide,

You will always find some on nettle wine’s left side;

Second, different are those who stand at either end,

But if you would move onward, neither is your friend;

Third, as you see clearly, both are different size,

Neither dwarf nor giant holds death in their insides;

Fourth, the second left and the second on the right,

Are twins once you taste them, though different at first sight.

And here’s how I solved it:

We have seven bottles, lined up on a table from smallest to largest. Three are nettle wine, two are poison, one lets you go forward through the black fire, and one lets you go back through the purple fire. Number the bottles 1 to 7 from left to right (because I’m treating this like at LSAT logic game). We know that neither bottle 1 nor bottle 7 is poison. We know that bottle 2 and bottle 6 are the same. So bottle 2 and bottle 6 could be wine, because there are 2 bottles of wine, but we also know that you will always find poison to the left of the nettle wine. Repeat, always. So if bottles 2 and 6 are wine, that means that bottle 1 is poison, and we know from the third clue that bottle 1 isn’t poison (we’re assuming of course that the poison is deadly, but it doesn’t work if you don’t assume that). So if 2 and 6 can’t be the wine, and they’re identical, they have to each be poison. That means that bottle number 3 has to be wine. What about bottle 7? The second clue seems to indicate that bottles 1 and 7 won’t be your friend if you want to move forward, but forward is danger, as it says in the intro. So let’s come back to that. If 7 is wine, that would allow 6 to be poison, and leaves us with bottles 1, 4, and 5 to contend with. We know that 1 can’t be wine, because no poison to the left of it, and the clues say it isn’t poison. So bottle 1 will either let you go forward or backward. So 1 will let you go forward or back, 2 is poison, 3 is wine, 4 will either let you go forward or back or it’s poison, 5 will either let you go forward or back or it’s poison, 6 is poison, and 7 is wine. But that’s not completely solved, and I’m not seeing another clue to get you the last step.

But there’s another way to do it: 1 will either take you forward or back, 2 is poison, 3 is wine, 4 is poison, 5 is wine, 6 is poison, 7 will take you forward or back. There are three poisons and 2 wines and 7 spots, so one poison automatically won’t be directly to the left of nettle wine. Also, the pairing of the dwarf and giant twice in the second and third clues, particularly the third clue, hints that they have similar qualities—specifically fireproofing qualities. Finally, this is a much neater arrangement that fits with all the clues, and the clues are supposed to lead you to an answer.

So how do you know whether 1 or 7 will take you onward and which one will take you back? The third clue says “if you would move onward, neither is your friend.” Taken figuratively, it means one bottle will take you back, so it’s not your friend, and one bottle will take you into more danger, so it’s not your friend either. And that’s always how I read it. But you can also read it literally: if you want to go on, your friend isn’t coming with you. And so bottle number 1, the smallest bottle that will only hold enough potion for one person, will let you go forward, and bottle 7 will send you back.

Voilá. I solved it. That being said, I’m not sure I’d be comfortable enough with that solution to drink a potion and walk through fire. Given that it took me years to figure it out, I am very, very impressed with Hermione. Of course I always have been. Nobody else I know memorizes all their textbooks.

I love the twist in this book. It does such a great job of setting up Snape as the bad guy, and yet it makes perfect sense that it’s Quirrel. Voldemort sticking out of the back of Quirrel’s head is totally terrifying (like I can’t believe I first read this when I was eight). And how Harry manages to hold him off is great.

And then Neville wins them the house cup! I will always love Dumbledore for that!

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets:

When I first read this book when I was a kid, I didn’t like it that much. I honestly don’t remember why. I mean okay it’s not my favorite in the series, but now when I read it, it’s so intense, and it gives me so many feelings.

The Dursleys are the worst. I wondered when I read the last book, and I feel like especially here it bears repeating, where is child services? Like when Harry and Dudley went to the same school, Harry’s teachers must have been able to tell that Harry was being neglected. He didn’t even have clothes that fit and his glasses were held together by tape. Come on people.

I know that the sixth book comes back to what happened in the second book because of Tom Riddle’s diary, but there’s also a lot of other stuff in this book that becomes important in the sixth book. Basically everything in the scene at Borgan and Burkes—the hand of glory, the opal necklace, even Harry hiding in the vanishing cabinet—are key to the sixth book. Later on, when Harry and Ron are disguised as Crabbe and Goyle, Malfoy reveals his family’s secret chamber under their drawing room floor, which will become important in the seventh book too.

Speaking of Harry hiding in the vanishing cabinet, I have fun imagining the conversation between Harry and McGonigall when he winds up traveling through the cabinets into Hogwarts and showed up at school a month before classes started. I know it’s not how it goes but it would have been a funny scene.

I feel like Harry complains a lot about not having money in the Muggle world. Why doesn’t he change some of his wizard gold for muggle money at any point during the series?

So Harry and Ron definitely cross a line for me when they steal the car to fly to Hogwarts. Like a certain amount of rule-breaking to solve the mystery like in the first book and this book and later on in the series is fine by me. But rule-breaking because the characters are being stupid and don’t think of the obvious solutions, like sending a letter to Hogwarts or waiting for Ron’s parents, kind of annoys me. Yes the car being at Hogwarts is important later, but I’m just kind of meh about how it gets there. (I like it when my characters are fundamentally smart and good.)

I love Colin Creevey. He is so cute, and he is also so brave. Annoying, yes, but it takes guts to approach a stranger and ask them for a photo. Not to mention the guts it takes to stick up for Harry against Malfoy.

Why doesn’t Hogwarts have a stash of spare wands? Or a contact with Olivander? It’s a wizard school. Accidents happen, right? Ron basically goes the whole year without doing magic, and his broken wand is frankly dangerous.

Speaking of Ron going the whole year with a broken wand, he isn’t the only one who misses large chunks of their education this year. Colin, Justin, Penelope Clearwater, Hermione, and even Ginny to some extent miss months of classes. I assume that in the first and second year it probably isn’t hugely important, but Percy’s girlfriend is a sixth year. How does she make that up? And when they cancel all exams at the end of the book, does that cover OWLS and NEWTS? These are just some questions I have.

Spiders continue to be scary, Lockhart continues to be a complete douchebag, and the ending of this book is just great. I’m not crying, you’re crying.

And that’s it for my thoughts on the first two books. I’ll be back next week to chat about the third, fourth, and fifth books.

Kill Your Darlings

Have you ever been reading a book, and a character dies, and you’re completely thrown out of the story? It’s happened to me more times than I can count, and it is the worst.

If you haven’t guessed by this point, this post is not about the old adage to trim down your novel by cutting words, characters, scenes, subplots, etc, though incidentally I’ve gotten pretty good at that. After talking about creating and developing strong characters, this post is about killing them. If you’ve missed any of the posts in this series on writing characters, you can go read about creating strong protagonists, antagonists, and side characters and about character development in general.

Fair warning, I will be using lots of examples in this post, so there will be some spoilers ahead, specifically from the Harry Potter books, the Hunger Games, the Lunar Chronicles, The Book Thief, Tamora Pierce’s Trickster books, and the Mortal Instruments. I will try to keep the spoilers to a minimum, where possible, but you have been warned, so read on at your own peril (but honestly, if you don’t know who dies in Harry Potter by this point, you deserve to be spoiled).

So let’s start with looking at some character deaths that drove me nuts.

First, Lupin, Tonks, and Colin Creevey. The climactic sequence of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is a huge battle, so naturally people are going to die. Lots of people are going to die. I accept that. Among my writing buddies, I am personally known for killing whole bunches of characters ruthlessly. That is not my problem with some of the deaths at the end of Harry Potter. We’ve already lost Hedwig, Dobby, and Fred in this book alone. Oh, and by the way, Harry’s about to go sacrifice his own life. And then we find out, just by seeing their bodies, that Lupin, Tonks, and Colin Creevey are dead. I get that this is the cost of war. But we don’t see them die, and then their deaths pale in comparison to the idea of Harry’s sacrifice. Personally, this combination doesn’t work for me.

To give one more example of a death that doesn’t work for me, let’s look at the end of Mockingjay, when out of nowhere, Prim is in the middle of a war zone and gets blown up. I will admit that the movie did a much better job with this and cleared up a lot of the confusion about what happened (in the movie, it may in fact be something I accept), but in the book, it was not okay. First of all, Katniss volunteered for the Hunger Games in the first book in order to save Prim, and by killing Prim, it really makes you wonder, well what was the point of all of this? Furthermore, in the books, Prim is never developed as a character—she is always just an object for Katniss to protect. We are sad when she dies because Katniss is sad, but we are not forced to mourn her in her own right. Finally, though again I think the movie clears this up nicely, there is nothing gained by Prim’s death. She doesn’t save anyone or accomplish anything by dying, and we already very clearly have seen the cost of war *takes a minute to wail “Finnick!”*. And then Katniss votes for one more Hunger Games, for Prim, which invalidates everything even more.

These are just some examples of how a character death can fail. In these cases, and I’ve found in almost all cases when I’m annoyed by a character death, it’s because either the character wasn’t sufficiently developed (Prim) or because the character’s death was not given enough attention in the book (Lupin, Tonks, and Colin Creevey). For the record, I’d also like to say that I really don’t like it when the book ends with the main character dying, even if it’s a noble self-sacrifice. It is never okay with me.

There are plenty of examples of character deaths that work well for me, though, and I’d like to talk about why. First, look at Dumbledore. He is Harry’s mentor, so it’s kind of a given that he has to die at some point. In order for the hero to go off and kick butt, or at least to go camping for a year in search of butt to kick (I say this with love because I actually have no issues with the camping trip that is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows), the mentor needs to get out of the way. Yet Dumbledore’s death works well because it is the culmination of a really dramatic scene. Harry and Dumbledore have stolen the Horcrux and made it back to Hogwarts. Dumbledore is sick, but Harry is confident he’ll be all right once he gets help. But then Snape, you awful person you, and oh yeah the Horcrux isn’t real. Plus, let’s not forget that there’s nothing like the drama of Dumbledore being blasted off the tallest tower. Finally, though we feel like we know enough about Dumbledore to mourn his death, there are also mysteries surrounding his death and also what he didn’t tell Harry in his life.

Next, think about one of the first deaths in The Lunar Chronicles series, Cinder’s younger stepsister Peony, who dies from the plague Cinder has discovered she is immune to. Peony isn’t Cinder’s mentor in any way, but she is the one person tying Cinder to her step-family. Though we haven’t spent much time with these characters yet, we already love Peony, not just because Cinder loves Peony but because we’ve gotten to know her ourselves. Finally, the sheer tragedy of it is just beautiful. Cinder is so, so close to saving her life, but she is just moments too late. I love it.

For similar reasons, I think all the deaths in Tamora Pierce’s books Trickster’s Choice and Trickster’s Queen work really well. We know the characters and we love the characters, their deaths push the plot and other characters forward, and with one exception, we see it all. Even the important death we don’t see on-screen is done really well, because we have to witness the other characters’ anxiety and grief while they wait for news. I also have no problem with everybody dying at the end of The Book Thief, though I know people who do, and in other World War II books with similar endings, I have been annoyed at the mass slaughter committed by the author to illustrate the tragedy of war.

I think how readers feel about character death can be so subjective. It depends on the reader and the book. Some of the situations that I described as not working for me might work for someone else, or might work better in a different book or different context. I prefer happy endings to tragic ones, or at least endings on the positive spectrum as far as endings go, but I recognize that not everyone shares this preference, and I have certainly been won over by books that don’t have happy endings. I’m not sure there are any hard and fast rules on how to effectively write a character death. I’ve killed a hundred characters in one move, and I’ve also killed an important character off-screen, though I can’t objectively say if any of those deaths work. There are all kinds of reasons for and ways to kill characters, whether because the character is a mentor or someone tying the protagonist down, or because the character’s life is part of the cost of war. Honestly, when I’m going into the last book in a series, I feel this awful and wonderful trepidation knowing that in some way, for the story to be significant, someone important has to die, but at the same time I don’t want anyone to die because I love them all so much. Of course, if it’s a long series, people have probably already died, so I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary for someone to die in the last book. Also, I’m definitely a fan of fates worse than death, such as Simon’s choice at the end of the Mortal Instruments series.

But while I don’t think there are any hard and fast rules on what makes a character death effective, I will say that for me it’s important that the character is sufficiently developed, that their death is given enough attention in the book, and that it is significant in some way to moving the plot and characters forward. I feel like it’s very similar to what I said a few days ago about developing your characters in general: people want to read about other people. Your characters lives should feel so real that your readers love them, cheer for them, and weep for them, and so should their deaths.

Writing for Kids

For the past several weeks, I’ve been working on a short story for this contest. Stories have to be for a middle grade audience, so ages eight to twelve, and a friend who was also working on a story for this contest asked me for some advice on how to write for kids, since I do it so well. My first response was “I don’t know. I just do.” It’s when I try to write for adults that I flail like a fish out of water. Trust me, it never goes well.

But then I started seriously thinking about it. I’ve already said I prefer to read young adult and middle grade books over adult books, so I’m more well-read in that category, which I think is the first step to writing anything. But what else do I take into account when I’m writing for kids? I’m not a kid anymore—I’m still working on that adult thing, but I’m certainly not eight years old anymore—and while I can remember some things from being eight years old, those memories are colored by other experiences. So, okay, I write for kids pretty naturally, but I still wasn’t sure exactly how I do it.

So, to answer my friend’s question and to satisfy my own curiosity—this is something I should know about myself, right?—I reread some of my favorite middle grade books and some new ones too. It couldn’t hurt my own writing, particularly for this contest, to think about it. I thought about not only why I enjoyed these books but what the writers did when they were writing them. And I came up with several constants.

First of all, kids aren’t dumb just because they’re kids. In fact, children can be quite intelligent and perceptive, but they’re logic isn’t always the same as an adult’s, and it’s totally possible that they will come to the wrong conclusion about something, which is, of course, excellent plot fodder.

So kids aren’t dumb or inherently more simple than adults, and the best middle grade and young adult stories I’ve read take this into account. Things are not overly simplistic. In fact, often they’re quite complicated, with multiple problems the character needs to face and no clear solutions. And just like the stories, the characters can’t be simple either. Kids are complicated, filled with all sorts of emotions and desires. And kids can be mean too, or make bad decisions, sometimes because of peer pressure, other times not. Again, excellent plot fodder.

For example, let’s look at Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, one of my favorite books in the series. Harry is thirteen years old, and this is the last book in the series intended for a middle grade audience. In the beginning, Harry loses his temper with Aunt Marge and runs away, convinced that he is going to be arrested for his illegal use of magic and will now have to live as an outlaw. He has a good reason to believe this might be the case, but it’s still not the best decision he could have made given the circumstances. Then, there are all the different plot lines: Sirius Black is coming after Harry and is connected with the murder of Harry’s parents, Harry is struggling to fend off the dementors, Professor Trelawney is constantly predicting Harry’s death, Malfoy is trying to get Hagrid fired and Buckbeak executed, Harry is desperate to beat Malfoy for the Quidditch Cup, Crookshanks keeps trying to eat Scabbers, Hermione has a secret, Lupin keeps getting ill… I could keep going. And all of these plots come together seamlessly in the climax. And that’s not to mention all the tension and emotion tied up in all this. And this is a book for middle schoolers!

Prisoner of Azkaban is fun to read. And so when I’m writing fiction for kids, the most important thing is that I’m having fun, that there’s this sense of elation and hope that pushes the story forward—especially when the story is tense or sad, especially when the characters struggle and fail and struggle some more. This is what I love about writing for kids, that there are complexities and bad decisions and struggles, but there is always hope.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Share this:

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Share this:

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: