Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling

December 15th, 2007

Harry Potter & The Chamber of Secrets
J.K. Rowling
251 p.

Bloomsbury, 1998

Back cover blurb:

Harry Potter is a wizard. he is in his second year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Little does he know that this year will be just as eventful as the last…

I don’t know how many times I have read this book. Still, it is my least favourite of the Potter-books. The fault in it does not lie in the plot or in the characters; in fact, I can’t really say wherein the fault lies. It might be that I have always read this book in paperback whilst I’ve read the others in hardback, even though that seems to be more a psychological than a literary reason for not liking it as much. It is definitely not a bad book. It is a good book, but it is apparent that the glory of the Harry Potter series was not yet certain. You aren’t supposed to know who everyone is and everything gets a hardy description, so you won’t be lost. Some of these descriptions are blunt and feel a little too obvious, but others are very nicely worked in. Harry gets to describe what Quidditch is about to a tiny first-years, and so also refreshes the memory of the reader. It is quite cleverly done. I read this book earlier this year, to refresh my memory before reading the seventh book, and I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did this time. You come to think of things which are hinted in this book and then spelt out in the seventh, and a number of times I went “Oh!” when I realised something that later cropped up in the seventh. Of course, I can’t remember what these things were.

Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets is the last of the Potter-books that are light-weight, so to say. The following book involves a lot of betraying and has a much darker atmosphere. This book, however, is still a whimsical child’s tale of a brilliant place which happens to have a really bad egg, but that happens and it isn’t all that bad. It is an extremely joyful novel. And I can’t help but like it, even though it isn’t quite as good as the other books. I guess I can blame it on nostalgia.

Entry Filed under: Children, English, Fantasy, Fiction