The Harry Potter books started lighter and kept getting darker. Darker in a kind of grim way, not in a black, delicious, wicked, delight way.
This one rather reminded me of grey skies and I guess that had something to do with the grey skies in the ending scenes of the movie.
Or maybe it was the Dementors draining the happiness out of me?
Yes, this one's the one when lots of new characters and ideas are introduced - one's Dementors which suck happiness out of you. Another few characters are Professor Lupin, the kind werewolf teacher, Sirius Black (the prisoner of Azkaban) and Peter Pettigrew.
I didn't really dislike this book, I just didn't really fall in love with it. While it was darker it wasn't so much fun and it wasn't fantastic with everyone being upset with each other - Hagrid wasn't so happy and people weren't so happy with his class, Hermione was more grouchy, the skies were darker. And there wasn't intrigue or depth to go along with the darkness.
A couple of things to note about the Potter books so far:
Professor Snape: OK, now that I've read the whole series I can say I know Professor Snape isn't the bad guy. But I figured this out from the first book, although the finer details were yet to be revealed. However it gets increasingly annoying to have every single thing revolve around how Harry and Ron and Hermione have to have arguments and suspicions over Snapey. Snape is cool! The more they whinge about Snape and try to blame him for anything and everything, the more I want to crack a broomstick over their heads and award a thousand points to Slytherin!
The Time-Turner: The Time-Turner concept was not bad but the way it was executed in both film and book (which were both differently done, markedly so) was crude. All the obvious and repeated pointers to "How could Hermione have done that, she hasn't done that class yet?" or "She was standing there and now she's standing here" over and over again were so blatant in the book.
And i the movie - when Harry went on about having seen his father save him - the moment it was out of his mouth, before I knew about the time-turner (I saw movie before read book) I said to myself "that was YOU not your Dad". I don't know how all this stuff is so obvious, or maybe I have just read a whole lot of similar books and too many borrow on the same plot devices.
However, I do not see myself as a huge fantasy fiction reader. I read some, I read it if it looks interesting or some if it's recommended, but I am by no means a buff.
So if I could figure that one out - who knows who else did?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Actually, my impression of the Harry Potter books is that they start out lighter and keep getting heavier. Have you seen the last book? It does an excellent impression of a house brick!
The longest one is Number 5, The Order of the Phoenix.
However for me the "heaviest" was Number 7, the last one, The Deathly Hallows ... I borrowed it from the library but the only one availble at the time was a hardcover Large Print edition.
That was some brick!
Oh, my internet sources tell me that the Prisoner of Azkaban took J.K. Rowling the least time to write out of all the Harry Potter books.
TimT, in terms of size, No.s 1, 2, 3 and fairly similar, short "normal" kids' size books then suddenly Rowling looked like she went on a binge and spilled all with these humungous efforts for 4-7. Looks quite odd on the bookshelf!
Post a Comment