Review: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

Posted 5th December 2016 by Emma in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s StoneHarry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling
Also by this author: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Series: Harry Potter #1
Also in this series: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing on 30th June 1997
Genres: YA Fantasy, Young Adult
Pages: 223
Format: Paperback
Source: I bought it
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One StarOne StarOne StarOne Star

Harry Potter is an ordinary boy who lives in a cupboard under the stairs at his Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon’s house, which he thinks is normal for someone like him who’s parents have been killed in a ‘car crash’.

He is bullied by them and his fat, spoilt cousin Dudley, and lives a very unremarkable life with only the odd hiccup (like his hair growing back overnight!) to cause him much to think about. That is until an owl turns up with a letter addressed to Harry and all hell breaks loose!

He is literally rescued by a world where nothing is as it seems and magic lessons are the order of the day.

Read and find out how Harry discovers his true heritage at Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft, the reason behind his parents mysterious death, who is out to kill him, and how he uncovers the most amazing secret of all time, the fabled Philosopher’s Stone! All this and muggles too.

Now, what are they?

I’m sure you have read many many reviews for Harry Potter so I am going to keep this one short and sweet.

Earlier this year I managed to find a paperback copy of this book in a local vintage shop and I was thrilled. I couldn’t wait to read this story again.

When I first read Harry Potter I was in my teens and I was instantly hooked, and this time it was exactly the same. I felt like I had been propelled back to my younger years.

I enjoyed every page and was wishing I had a copy of the Chamber of Secrets as soon as I finished the last page.

These books really are timeless and I know when I have children that I will eagerly waiting for the day that I can read them Harry Potter.

About J.K. Rowling

Although she writes under the pen name J.K. Rowling, pronounced like rolling, her name when her first Harry Potter book was published was simply Joanne Rowling. Anticipating that the target audience of young boys might not want to read a book written by a woman, her publishers demanded that she use two initials, rather than her full name. As she had no middle name, she chose K as the second initial of her pen name, from her paternal grandmother Kathleen Ada Bulgen Rowling. She calls herself Jo and has said, “No one ever called me ‘Joanne’ when I was young, unless they were angry.” Following her marriage, she has sometimes used the name Joanne Murray when conducting personal business. During the Leveson Inquiry she gave evidence under the name of Joanne Kathleen Rowling. In a 2012 interview, Rowling noted that she no longer cared that people pronounced her name incorrectly.

As a child, Rowling often wrote fantasy stories, which she would usually then read to her sister. She recalls that: “I can still remember me telling her a story in which she fell down a rabbit hole and was fed strawberries by the rabbit family inside it. Certainly the first story I ever wrote down (when I was five or six) was about a rabbit called Rabbit. He got the measles and was visited by his friends, including a giant bee called Miss Bee.” At the age of nine, Rowling moved to Church Cottage in the Gloucestershire village of Tutshill, close to Chepstow, Wales. When she was a young teenager, her great aunt, who Rowling said “taught classics and approved of a thirst for knowledge, even of a questionable kind,” gave her a very old copy of Jessica Mitford’s autobiography, Hons and Rebels. Mitford became Rowling’s heroine, and Rowling subsequently read all of her books.

Emma

Reading this book contributed to these challenges:


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