Entry 2: The Books – Where Better to Start Than the Beginning

     It all started with the books of course. In 1997, J.K. Rowling released what she probably never imagined in her wildest dreams the book that would make one of the world’s most famous authors to date. She was struggling to make ends meet, rumored to have been writing down notes for her story on napkins in a café, and is now continuing to publish books regularly and live a more comfortable life.

            The books follow the life of Harry Potter, a young boy orphaned from a time when he was just a young baby and forced to live with his horrible Aunt, Uncle, and Cousin, the Dudleys. While calling the family horrible should be chalked up to a matter of opinion, I’ve never personally spoke to anybody who was fond of these characters, the characters who forced Harry to live in a cupboard under the stairs mostly due to a form of discrimination, but I digress. On Harry’s 11^th birthday, it is revealed to him after a series of events that he is a wizard, as was his parents, and this was why the Dudleys hated him so. It is from here that his new life starts as he travels to Hogwarts to study witchcraft and wizardry, and everything changes for him.

            Something that is very common throughout the book series is that they do tend to start in the Dudley home for most of the books, 4 or 5 of the 7 anyway. You typically get to see Harry dealing with the hardships of being in their home for the summer, with one bad thing or another happening involving magic, and then Harry is back on his way to the wizarding world.

            Rowling has stated that the theme of the books is death, a them that critics began to find too dark as the series went on. Starting from book 4 on, there was at least one (sometimes many more) major character death by the end of the book. While the story may get grim, it my own personal belief that the stories originally grew with the readers. The content was always dark in a sense, this is true, but I found that as I got older, the content of the books tended to get more mature as well, including more deaths, romance between the characters, and much more intricate plots. I wouldn’t say that any of the books are quite out of the grasp of children though, but I might say reading the first book at age 8 would be okay while the seventh book may want to be held off until age 12 or 13 before a child could truly appreciate all of the intricacies.