Harry Potter Children's Collection: The Complete Collection

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In an 8 November 2002 Slate article, Chris Suellentrop likened Potter to a "trust-fund kid whose success at school is largely attributable to the gifts his friends and relatives lavish upon him". [123] In a 12 August 2007, review of Deathly Hallows in The New York Times, however, Christopher Hitchens praised Rowling for "unmooring" her "English school story" from literary precedents "bound up with dreams of wealth and class and snobbery", arguing that she had instead created "a world of youthful democracy and diversity". [124] I’m a big Harry Potter fan. The first few came out when I was in middle and high school, and the later ones when I was in college. I have vivid memories of going to Barnes & Noble with my sister at midnight to get two copies (we shared a lot growing up, but no way were we going to share those!). So as soon as I became a parent nearly a decade ago, I started wondering what age to read Harry Potter with my kids. Rowling, JK (2006). "Biography". JKRowling.com. Archived from the original on 21 April 2006 . Retrieved 21 May 2006. Each of the seven books is set over the course of one school year. Harry struggles with the problems he encounters, and dealing with them often involves the need to violate some school rules. If students are caught breaking rules, they are often disciplined by Hogwarts professors. The stories reach their climax in the summer term, near or just after final exams, when events escalate far beyond in-school squabbles and struggles, and Harry must confront either Voldemort or one of his followers, the Death Eaters, with the stakes a matter of life and death – a point underlined, as the series progresses, by characters being killed in each of the final four books. [21] [22] In the aftermath, he learns important lessons through exposition and discussions with head teacher and mentor Albus Dumbledore. The only exception to this school-centred setting is the final novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, in which Harry and his friends spend most of their time away from Hogwarts, and only return there to face Voldemort at the dénouement. [21] Allusions

Turns out, there’s no right age for Harry Potter (or a multitude of other books and milestones). Every family and every child is a bit different. Main articles: Legal disputes over the Harry Potter series, Religious debates over the Harry Potter series, Politics of Harry Potter, and Tanya Grotter Fry, Stephen (10 December 2005). "Living with Harry Potter". BBC Radio 4. Archived from the original on 21 October 2014 . Retrieved 10 December 2005. Michael Rosen, a novelist and poet, held the opinion that the books were not suited for children, as they would be unable to grasp the complex themes. Rosen also stated that "J. K. Rowling is more of an adult writer." [111] The critic Anthony Holden wrote in The Observer on his experience of judging Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban for the 1999 Whitbread Awards. His overall view of the series was negative – "the Potter saga was essentially patronising, conservative, highly derivative, dispiritingly nostalgic for a bygone Britain", and he speaks of "a pedestrian, ungrammatical prose style". [112] Ursula K. Le Guin said, "I have no great opinion of it [...] it seemed a lively kid's fantasy crossed with a ' school novel,' good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited." [113] By contrast, author Fay Weldon, while admitting that the series is "not what the poets hoped for", nevertheless goes on to say, "but this is not poetry, it is readable, saleable, everyday, useful prose". [114] For independent readers, the timeline varies quite a bit more. As soon as my oldest got the hang of reading, he dove right into independent reading. He liked challenging himself, so read the 1st book on his own the summer before he entered kindergarten. He enjoyed it and started the 2nd book, but wasn’t as engaged with that one. So he waited until the following summer to read books 2 & 3. At that point, he was all in.Besides the sheer brilliance of plotting in this book, Rowling also presents some interesting commentary with the Dementors, which symbolize depression and force Harry to grapple with his past trauma. Indeed, though Goblet of Fire is widely identified as the “transition point” into the darker themes of the series’ latter half, Prisoner of Azkaban is definitely where those themes begin to take root. With all that said, ages 5-6+ have seemed to work really well for our family to start reading the first few books aloud.

Further information: Fictional universe of Harry Potter Early years The Elephant House was one of the cafés in Edinburgh where Rowling wrote the first part of Harry Potter.Things take a turn for the expository in this penultimate installment, which sees Harry learn all about Voldemort’s family and “origin story,” so to speak. Dumbledore gives Harry these lessons to prepare him for a grand future battle with Voldemort, presumably in the vein of keeping his enemies closer. What Harry doesn’t know is that Dumbledore is planning something even bigger — a plan that he, Harry, becomes more inexorably entangled in with each passing day.