Reviews

Comments from children

'I am a real Harry Potter fan … Page after page the story was so exciting, funny and surprising that I wanted to read it as fast as possible.' Lucy Findlay, aged 9

'The books are good because they have funny bits and frightening bits.' - Rory Summerley, aged 9

'Everyone I know loves [Harry Potter.] … Basically the books are very interesting, full of good and evil magic, children training to be wizards and lots of scary monsters … J.K. Rowling's books are more imaginative than any others I've read.' Charles Rosser, aged 8

'I have read all of J.K. Rowling's books and enjoyed every one, so I was looking forward reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. It was meant to last the holidays, but I got so engrossed, it only lasted two weeks!' Lindsay Thomson, aged 10


'The amazing, funny and sometimes scary plot keeps you hooked and your fingers will itch to keep turning the pages.' Sian Pearson, aged 11

Comments from grown-ups

'I think they’re brilliant. I’ve liked them since the first one. They’re incredibly traditional stories, good versus evil, set in a boarding school romp. With magic. You just can’t do better then that.' Ian Hislop

'I thought [Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban] was magical. Absolutely fantastic. A triumph. What’s good about the book is that is does take those really big themes — there’s evil, there’s right, there’s wrong, there’s morality, there’s lousy people, there’s good people. All the biggest themes are there like in all the great children’s books over the ages. A book should entertain, inform, amuse and make people want to read. This book pretty much hits all of those on the head.' Rosie Boycott

'I really like them. They mix brilliantly the magical and the mundane. [JK Rowling] has really tapped into that thing that kids do of looking under the bedclothes and imagining the world.' David Baddiel

As far as I am concerned, if a children's book is worth reading, it's worth reading by adults. I can't wait to get back to start it all over again.' Melanie McDonagh
Sunday Times
'...the book [Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince] really takes off when Dumbledore comes to collect Harry…this is where we start to hear Rowling’s heart sing. We share her delight...the novel has notable joie de vivre…when her playfulness bursts through, there is no doubting her wit, inventiveness and talent for comical changes of register. It is impressive, given the unprecedented pressure that Rowling is under to sustain a sequence that she planned in obscurity, that she maintains its emotional energy, humour and the many spinning plots of its plot without showing the strain. Nicolette Jones
Daily Mail
'Let’s get it over with at the beginning. It’s not just hype. The new Harry Potter [Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince] is fantastic. Georgia Metcalfe

The Guardian

'The cult of Potter has been created through word-of-mouth, not marketing hype … Harry's a pretty ordinary sort of boy … In fact, in the TV-dominated, celebrity-spotted, smart-clever, self-referential world that dominates the children's market these days, he is alarmingly old-fashioned. He is not postmodernist, sophisticated, slick, hip or street-smart.

He is cheerful, decent, kind and brave, loyal, good at games and rather moral … The richness and scale of Rowling's invention is exhilarating. These may be complex novels … but the real proof of their quality lies in their power to draw the reader into Harry's world and make it seem entirely believable. … Alex McGregor, 10, who has read The Philosopher's Stone five times and The Chamber of Secrets, four, says thoughtfully, "When I am lying in bed at night, I usually wonder if there is a real Hogwarts, and whether I can go there one day."'

Mail on Sunday

'There can be no higher praise for a book … the publishers may like to place "Harry Potter is guaranteed to keep your child quiet for hours on end" on the back of the next edition. This alone would qualify the book for its full five stars. In fact, I’d be tempted to award it 500 stars … J.K. Rowling has somehow cracked that magic code, denied to so many thousands of other children's authors: the code that allows adults into the minds of children … [she] has somehow found a secret map into the mind of a child, full of monsters and magic and secret passages, and … has used it to construct a living, breathing world from which adults are barred … As an adult … I gawped across the ravine from adulthood to childhood, seeing the outlines of children flying on broomsticks, wishing that I could join them, looking vainly for a bridge that alas was nowhere to be found … My son is now 30 pages from the end. For him, the only thing wrong with the Harry Potter books is that, after them, no other books come up to scratch.'

'Somewhere in this enchanting mixture is a formula so brilliant it eludes analysis... Rich and demanding stuff.'

Daily Telegraph

'What makes J.K. Rowling's tales so appealing to children who struggle to read a book? It is a recurring phenomenon that dyslexic children who are bibliophobics will suddenly take off with a particular author …

Those who find reading difficult are not going to browse through text as an idle distraction. What they read must be worth the trouble and effort. An action-packed tale with interesting characters and an exciting plot, is essential. Episodes must be in a logical sequence. The Harry Potter books have hit on the right recipe. Dyslexics, young and old, will consume them avidly.'

New York Times

'Though all this hocus-pocus is delightful, the magic in the book is not the real magic of the book. Much like Roald Dahl, J.K. Rowling has a gift for keeping the emotions, fears and triumphs of her characters on a human scale, even while the supernatural is popping out all over.'

New York Sunday Herald
'At the book store signing … hundreds and hundreds of people lining the streets, clutching their books. "This is hot stuff," one mother gushed … "You've got parents fighting with their own kids over whose turn it is to read the books.
Kids love it, parents love it. It's amazing" Johnny, an 11-year-old … has read the three books a total of 25 times, and says coolly that Rowling has replaced his previous favourite author, Roald Dahl. "She is much better," he says. "She is much more creative than Dahl." … "My son turned off the TV so he could read this book," said another mother of an 11-year-old boy. "That is unheard of."'

Time

'The whole Harry Potter hubbub … the word-of-mouth testimonials from parents marvelling that their non-reading children (even boys!) are tearing through the Potter books and begging for more, … the confessions of a growing number of adults not so young that they find these books irresistible …

Rowling [is] performing magic … she knows how to feed the desire not just to hear or read a story but to live it as well … [Rowling] can be both genuinely scary and consistently funny, adept at both broad slapstick and allusive wordplay … So many people both young and naïve and older and jaded have surrendered to the illusions set forth in Harry Potter's fictional world. They want to believe the unbelievable, and Rowling makes it easy and great good fun for them to do so. How pleasant to be persuaded.'

Glasgow Saturday Herald

For the parents buying the books for their children … the Potter experience is a familiar one from their own early reading. There are pointy-hatted wizards, evil step-parents, boarding schools, miscreant schoolboys, eccentric teachers, and lots of guffawing pratfalls.

But what Rowling has also done is to write these fantasy tales for a post-Star Wars, thoroughly mediated age - the great struggle in the Potter universe is between the wizards who go over to "the dark side", and those who don't … Beneath the mixter-maxter of ordinary life … huge and decisive processes are on the move. These stories are about forcing us to shrug off our everyday complacency, recognising the powers that really determine our lives - and then to take some kind of moral stand in relation to them.'
Glasgow Saturday Herald

For the parents buying the books for their children … the Potter experience is a familiar one from their own early reading. There are pointy-hatted wizards, evil step-parents, boarding schools, miscreant schoolboys, eccentric teachers, and lots of guffawing pratfalls.

But what Rowling has also done is to write these fantasy tales for a post-Star Wars, thoroughly mediated age - the great struggle in the Potter universe is between the wizards who go over to "the dark side", and those who don't … Beneath the mixter-maxter of ordinary life … huge and decisive processes are on the move. These stories are about forcing us to shrug off our everyday complacency, recognising the powers that really determine our lives - and then to take some kind of moral stand in relation to them.'


Sunday Express

'The most remarkable publishing success for a generation - the achievement of J.K. Rowling is to have created a world in which anything might happen, yet everything abides by its own tightly constructed, impossibly wonderful rules. And the story is told with such momentum, imagination and irrepressible humour that it can captivate adults and children alike.'

'The plot fits together like a wondrous jigsaw in which you can only see the picture when the last piece is put in place... Thank you JK Rowling.'

Independent on Sunday

'Like Gameboys, Teletubbies and films by George Lucas, the Harry Potter books have permeated the national child consciousness.'

New Statesman
'Modern children (and many adults) live lives of such stress that we need the consolations of Harry's world as never before.' Amanda Craig

Newsweek
'Rowling never condescends to her characters or her readers. And she works very hard to give her readers a superbly constructed story in every book … As a bonus, she's funny ... Anyone who reads these novels can't help but come away with a high standard for what a good story should be - and the knowledge that a good story doesn't need a movie or a lunch box to make it better ... Now, that's magic.'


School Librarian
'The terrific and uncluttered straightforward narrative style is as clear as ever in persuading the reader into impulsive and irresistible page turning. What an absolute joy when all reasonable logic says that a book of this size [Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix] is an impossibility for some particular young reader, and yet that youngster determindely reads on and on.'

The Observer

'This is storytelling of a high order indeed.'

The Scotsman
'The Harry Potter books are unusual in almost every imaginable respect ... Playgrounds and offices have been buzzing with excitement on the basis of a mere old-fashioned book: no shrieking billboards, no TV series, no talking toys …
This is a world so fully and richly imagined that every detail makes resonant sense: characters so complete that they feel like old friends, settings elaborately visualised in every element, a universe created with such zest and care that it feels, in all its fantastic magic, entirely real … the plot effects a roller-coaster ride where guilt and innocence, light and darkness, dissolve and change shape before our very eyes. To reveal the quirks and kinks of that roller coaster would be seriously to diminish the reader's pleasure … bliss awaits.'


The Spectator
'For her success in creating what will undoubtedly be a highly literate generation Rowling deserves great praise.'
Time Out
'It [Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix] has Rowling's strongest writing cards on immediate and continuous display: a breathlessly powerful sense of plot and an unbelievably fecund imagination... 766 pages of Harry and his pals, what more could one want?... Rowling strikes the perfect balance, as always, of speaking to her adult and younger readers... Rowling's take on 15-year-old boyhood is masterfully done and places humanity, not magic, at the centre of the book. David Phelan