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A review by snowbenton
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling
2.0
My parents gave me this book for Christmas when I was 9, and I loved it. Like any good millennial I went to midnight Borders book releases and like any good nerd I was a member of many HP RPGs in middle school and if you ask me my house I'll tell you Hufflepuff. I've read this a million times as a kid, a handful of times in high school, and once in college circa fifteen years ago and so I figured they need one more go before I yeet them out of my house because I don't really want anything with Rowling's transphobic name on it.
But despite the nostalgia and cultural phenomena, this isn't actually a very good book.
It's simple. It's a doofy children's story and that requires you to ignore a lot of logic. This is mostly par for the course, but I fully get why so many publishers rejected this. Like, for example, detention. Yes, do send four eleven-year-olds into the forbidden forest that even adults are afraid of with the only chaperones being a useless groundskeeper and his dog, and then spice it up by sending two of the eleven-year-olds off with the dog as their only chaperone so they can search for something killing unicorns from 11pm until DAWN and then make sure the useless groundskeeper tells them that he doesn't even know anything powerful enough to kill a unicorn, great idea, good job.
The plot holes are also so frequent and so large that it's like driving through a small town in the northeast after a particularly bad winter: juddery and irritating. Why is Harry given to the Dursleys when any wizard family would have taken him in? How did Ron not know about the Sorting Hat (to the point of scaring Harry by saying he thought they would be wrestling a troll? BRO YOU LIVE IN THIS WORLD)? Where are the teachers families, and when do they sleep if they're always patrolling the corridors? Why did Rowling have to decide that all Slytherins are evil and ugly? It's weird at best how clearly the text supports bullying of Slytherin students (endorsed even by Dumbledore and his points bullshit at the end). If Harry can do so much magic as a child without a wand, why does anyone need a wand at all? If the wand chooses the wizard, why is Ron using Charlie's old wand if Charlie is still alive and presumably in need of it while he's fucking around with dragons? Who is paying for this school to exist? Am I to believe that wizards don't ever learn basic high school physics, math, or literatur, and is that why they're all so useless?
And why is every single adult in Harry's life so absolutely fucking terrible? McGonagall doesn't stand up to Dumbledore and insist Harry shouldn't be left with the Dursleys. Dumbledore regularly lets Harry put himself in harm's way, and it's not subtle -- even the three eleven-year-old heroes realize he left them the cloak on purpose knowing they would hunt down Voldemort. Molly Weasley is a terrible mother: she makes Ron a sweater he hates every year, she left most of her children at the school from September until summer break, and she doesn't seem to care about them at all. I really don't have any idea how any of us liked her character. The Dursleys themselves are terrible. Hagrid is a danger to himself on a good day and a danger to others on most days. There isn't one worthwhile adult in the whole thing.
If I was reading this book now for the first time, I would have finished it and then promptly forgotten it entirely and never bothered with the rest of the series.
But despite the nostalgia and cultural phenomena, this isn't actually a very good book.
It's simple. It's a doofy children's story and that requires you to ignore a lot of logic. This is mostly par for the course, but I fully get why so many publishers rejected this. Like, for example, detention. Yes, do send four eleven-year-olds into the forbidden forest that even adults are afraid of with the only chaperones being a useless groundskeeper and his dog, and then spice it up by sending two of the eleven-year-olds off with the dog as their only chaperone so they can search for something killing unicorns from 11pm until DAWN and then make sure the useless groundskeeper tells them that he doesn't even know anything powerful enough to kill a unicorn, great idea, good job.
The plot holes are also so frequent and so large that it's like driving through a small town in the northeast after a particularly bad winter: juddery and irritating. Why is Harry given to the Dursleys when any wizard family would have taken him in? How did Ron not know about the Sorting Hat (to the point of scaring Harry by saying he thought they would be wrestling a troll? BRO YOU LIVE IN THIS WORLD)? Where are the teachers families, and when do they sleep if they're always patrolling the corridors? Why did Rowling have to decide that all Slytherins are evil and ugly? It's weird at best how clearly the text supports bullying of Slytherin students (endorsed even by Dumbledore and his points bullshit at the end). If Harry can do so much magic as a child without a wand, why does anyone need a wand at all? If the wand chooses the wizard, why is Ron using Charlie's old wand if Charlie is still alive and presumably in need of it while he's fucking around with dragons? Who is paying for this school to exist? Am I to believe that wizards don't ever learn basic high school physics, math, or literatur, and is that why they're all so useless?
And why is every single adult in Harry's life so absolutely fucking terrible? McGonagall doesn't stand up to Dumbledore and insist Harry shouldn't be left with the Dursleys. Dumbledore regularly lets Harry put himself in harm's way, and it's not subtle -- even the three eleven-year-old heroes realize he left them the cloak on purpose knowing they would hunt down Voldemort. Molly Weasley is a terrible mother: she makes Ron a sweater he hates every year, she left most of her children at the school from September until summer break, and she doesn't seem to care about them at all. I really don't have any idea how any of us liked her character. The Dursleys themselves are terrible. Hagrid is a danger to himself on a good day and a danger to others on most days. There isn't one worthwhile adult in the whole thing.
If I was reading this book now for the first time, I would have finished it and then promptly forgotten it entirely and never bothered with the rest of the series.