35 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
What a Disappointment!, September 24, 2000
This review is from: Beacham's Sourcebook For Teaching Young Adult Fiction: Exploring Harry Potter (Hardcover)
If you couldn't believe that someone could make the Harry Potter books sound boring, this book will change your mind. It should be subtited,"Why People Drop Out of Graduate School." The author stretches credulity to the breaking point by throwing everything but the proverbial kitchen sink into her desperate grasp for literary references. Deliver us from "scholars" who think that everything is a symbol of something else! (She compares the Invisibiity Cloak to the Shroud of Turin, if you can imagine.) Her conclusions range from the obvious to the far-fetched, with very little enlightenment in between. The book gave me the impression that she had read the Potter books only once, taking notes with one hand while she turned pages with the other. There is no real appreciation for the series, and certainly no insight. If you would like to destroy a potential reader's enthusiasm for Harry Potter, this book is a good choice. If this is typical of the proposed series of guides, I dread the thought of the volume dealing with the Narnia Chronices. Save your money - buy a good mythological dictionary, a French dictionary, and a Latin dictionary, and find your own references. You'll have a lot more fun.
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27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Worst of a really bad subgenre, August 13, 2001
This review is from: Beacham's Sourcebook For Teaching Young Adult Fiction: Exploring Harry Potter (Hardcover)
This is the worst of a flurry of milk-the-Harry-Potter-craze books, surpassing the pathetic JK Rowling biography and the abysmal "We Love Harry Potter!" book. Padded with pseudo-intellectualism, every strained comparison and mythical nuance, it drones on for about 500 pages on topics that have very little to do with Harry Potter. If you don't take it seriously, it has a certain comedy value--because it DOES take itself seriously. Riddikulusly so.
The uneasy feeling began when I read "NOT approved by JK Rowling" on the cover, and was compounded when I read the introduction: "Harry represents an archetypal hero who would have been as familiar to ancient Greeks as he is to modern suburbanites." (And I may be mistaken, but I thought the plural of kibbutz was kibbutzim. Editor, please?) It immediately launched into stuff about Harry Potter merchandise, fans, newspaper and movies. It also, rather sneeringly, goes over the people with concerns about Harry Potter comments, as well as lumping them all into "conservative Christian" category (which is inaccurate, as I've met Jews, Muslims, atheists who were anti-HP) and apparently dismissing their concerns.
The book is tiresome for a long while, engaging in media name-dropping and burbling about the various prestigious shows that JKR has been on and all the awards the books have won. The author also feels it necessary to go over the various words that might be too tough for the uneducated masses ( "foreshadowing"; "Beatles"; "anomaly"; "Rolls Royce"...) Oh, and there are spiky, unattractive pictures scattered through the book.
After about forty pages of such drivel, we finally get to the actual content on the books and characters. Unfortunately, the book is so bogged down by pseudo-intellectualism and the obsession with symbolism that any coherency (not to mention rationality) is rapidly lost. After a few pages of actually talking normally, the author felt it necessary to start off by explaining the significance of the names. Though some undoubtedly have meaning ("Lupin," for one) they then degenerate into talking about how Hedwig inspires Harry, and theorizing that Crookshanks, rather than just being a bow-legged cat, is named after the fantasy illustrator George Cruikshanks.
We are also given material that will put any 9-12 student to sleep, as well as many adults. The book cheerfully gives us a geography lesson on the UK, and a long listing of seeming irrelevent Greek mythology. Then King Arthur, then fairy tales. These send the author into a new spin of babbling: "Only the arrival of the Dementors [...] rouses him from his unconscious stupor, but ironically the Dementors' Kiss, an act in the normal world that represents warmth, causes the complete absence of a person's conscience as in the Kiss of Judas."
Other examples of pathetically strained thinking are: the connecting of Dudley's name with Dudlachd, the winter months of Scotland; the connecting of Celtic holidays with Hogwarts' Halloween party; respect of elders is equated with ancestor worship (WHAT?); Harry's infant swaddling of blankets is compared to Moses's basket (it stops just short of saying "Harry is Christ!"); and claiming that Dumbledore is similar to Merlin (somehow he strikes me as a watered-down Gandalf...).
I hate to offend anyone, but frankly NO BOOK ON EARTH has this much symbolism and interwoven meaning in it. Not even Lord of the Rings. The fact that the book was not approved by JK Rowling indicates that her thoughts and intents were never consulted. This person is simply loading what would be a slim volume with pseudo-intellectualism and a lot of babble, drawing from every source with even an imaginary connection to HP. (I can't imagine that when Rowling wrote of baby Harry in a bunch of blankets, she was thinking of Moses)
I give it one star for being entertaining. It's so ridiculously earnest that it comes across as comedic. It's silly, overworked and overburdened with information that does not have anything to do with its sources. So, read it for the comedic value and a good laugh or two. As a genuine work of "exploration," it's a dismal flop.
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39 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Don't waste your money on this junk!!, October 11, 2000
This review is from: Beacham's Sourcebook For Teaching Young Adult Fiction: Exploring Harry Potter (Hardcover)
I love the Harry Potter books; my kids love the Harry Potter books. We've each read all the books many many times. We bought four copies of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I thought that this book might be an intelligent, insightful analysis of the books, but it is mostly irrelevant, mumbo-jumbo thrown in apparently to fill the pages of the book-- the examples given in the other reviews listed here are just the tip of the iceberg. It manages to be pretentious-- in its claim to be a scholarly examination of the books, and insulting-- through its weird repetitive simple sentence structure and vocabulary-- at the same time. I tend to be a book hoarder and I will almost always finish reading any book that I start, but this one is going out in the trash, and I haven't read much of it. Any teacher who knows anything about children's literature or teaching reading doesn't need this book, and no kid would be interested in it.
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