Book Review: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
★★★☆☆ (3/5, Liked It)
My Rating: ★★★☆☆
Intro & Summary
This book kicks off J.K. Rowling’s famous Harry Potter series. Orphaned Harry Potter lives a miserable life under the guardianship of his aunt and uncle, until he receives an invitation to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry on his eleventh birthday. Not only is Harry a wizard, he’s famous, wealthy and destined for greatness.
I struggled a bit on how to mentally contextualise this book. I don’t like or agree with J.K. Rowling, and I always thought she wasn’t nearly so amazing an author as everyone seemed to make her out as. I also wasn’t one of those people who made Harry Potter a part of my personality—I don’t meant that in a judgemental sense, just pure fact—so I was perfectly happy to just drop any fandom I did feel for the franchise.
That said, I didn’t want to let those things taint my review of the book itself. This isn’t really the place to get into the debate around the “death of the author” and separating them from their work.
My aim with this year’s theme is to see if the books I read and enjoyed when I was younger still hold up. So I tried to force myself into a more objective mindset. I will admit, I think I went into this book with a more critical eye than I did for Redwall. But I think I can justify that a bit. With how BIG the Harry Potter universe became and still remains, I wanted to really get in there and dissect the book that got it all started and see if it’s really as good as we all convinced ourselves it was.
Plot & Style
Despite any misgivings about content or intent, Rowling’s writing style is fine, in my opinion. It’s easy to read, and I can see how young me really enjoyed at least the first few books in this series.
Similar to Redwall, there are a lot of things that happen over the course of the book, in relatively quick succession. I expect this will be a running theme in this year’s reading list, since that’s quite common in books written for younger audiences. Attention spans are low. Let’s keep the action coming. As an adult who’s used to reading slower moving, adult-aimed fiction, it takes a moment to get used to the pacing but then I was in.
My biggest issue with the plot were the many inconsistencies, which of course my writer’s brain then had to dissect. You’ll find more specific instances in the World section below in regards to the worldbuilding.
The silliest of these inconsistencies is during a Quidditch match against Slytherin. Everyone is watching Harry try to hold onto his hexed broom. So the Slytherin captain “seized the Quaffle and scored five times without anyone noticing.” That… doesn’t count. Why was this included? To show us that Slytherins are “evil” and don’t care about the rules getting in the way of their own success?
There were several points throughout the book where something happened that didn’t make sense for any reason other than “the plot needs this to move forward” and/or “Harry is the hero.”
In Chapter 13, Harry suddenly remembers seeing Nicolas Flamel’s name on Dumbledore’s chocolate frog card. They did some alchemy together. That’s their breakthrough on how to find out more about him, after trying to find him in the library for months at this point. (Do they not have a card catalogue?)
Then Hermione goes to get a book she “checked out of the library weeks ago” and flips through until she finds Nicolas Flamel and information about the Philosopher’s Stone. Now surely, if she’s had this book for weeks and is able to flip through until she finds either “alchemy” or “Nicolas Flamel,” then surely she at least skimmed that part. Did she forget? Am I overthinking? Because it felt to me like Hermione had actually found the information they were looking for in a book, but the plot wouldn’t allow her to mention it until Harry saw it on a trading card.
In Chapter 15, it is decided that a fitting punishment for 11-year-olds caught out of bed is to send them, at night, into the Forbidden Forest, which is off limits to students, to find what’s been hunting unicorns. They are accompanied only by Hagrid, who technically isn’t supposed to use magic ever, and his dog Fang, who is a coward. And they split up. After Hagrid basically laughs at Malfoy for choosing to go with Fang.
It’s established that unicorns are powerful, magical, basically sacred creatures. Whatever’s hunting them must be (and is) crazy bad. But we have to send the children in because Harry has to witness Voldemort drinking unicorn blood, and to meet some prophetic centaurs that I don’t think come up much again or really amount to much in this book.
World
Rowling’s worldbuilding is an interesting conundrum. When I think of Harry Potter I get a very vivid idea of the aesthetic: the fantastic world, the magical school, and endless possibilities. This has all been wholly embraced and enhanced by the fandom and transformed into something truly magical.
But reading the book itself, I found that—despite some good ideas here and there—the worldbuilding was mostly half-baked at best.
From the beginning, you can really tell Rowling just wanted to get to the magical world but needed to set up Harry’s status quo in the mundane world first. And because of this general disinterest in the Muggle World, the Wizarding World suffers. The relationship between the two worlds just doesn’t make sense.
“We can’t tell the muggles about magic or they’ll want magical solutions to everything,” Hagrid tells Harry in chapter 5, before complaining that muggle stuff just isn’t as convenient as magic and (unintentionally) appearing to show that it’s the wizards who are lazy and spoiled by magic. It’s also not explained how wizards are expected to keep their world a secret but it’s fine for Harry and Hagrid to take public transport in London with an owl and all his school kit. There are some strange people in London, but it can’t just be Harry doing this sort of thing because Hogwarts has lots of students.
I assumed most of the students, especially those from wizarding families, lived within the bounds of the Wizarding World, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Harry meets the Weasleys at King’s Cross Station on the London side. Why are they in London? If you reach Platform 9 3/4 by running through a wall (which can’t exist because there’s no wall between platforms 9 and 10 at King’s Cross, by the way), where are all the other students coming from? Is there a trickle of people just running through this wall throughout the morning? There sure are a lot of people on the platform on the other side. And then later Ron asks Harry what muggles are like after he and his family were just in London.
Even in the Wizarding World itself there are lots of questions and inconsistencies. The largest one I noticed as this: If it’s such a heinous crime to kill a unicorn, where are all the unicorn horns sold in the apothecary and used in potions class (at a middle- and highschool level) coming from? Someone must be harvesting them somehow.
I sent M a lot of somewhat unhinged notes about the sheer number of holes and questions in the worldbuilding. These are just a handful of examples. There are a lot of ideas for the Wizarding World, but very, very few of them are actually well executed by Rowling herself.
Thinking about this, I came to a conclusion: People who enjoy fantasy, and especially those who love it, tend to be very imaginative and incredibly willing to suspend disbelief as much as necessary.
The Harry Potter fandom has collectively built up the magical world of the series into something far beyond Rowling’s capabilities, filling in or glossing over the holes and gaps and adding or changing things to improve the world into something more cohesive. Personally I think that’s beautiful, and it’s wonderful to think that no two people’s imaginary Wizarding World is entirely identical. But that’s something the fandom did. The books themselves never actually held up to the kind of world the fandom built. And they never could.
Characters
Many of the characters in this book are surprisingly unlikable. I tried to keep in mind that the main children are only eleven, but even then the level of bullying, especially by Harry and Ron, can’t be ignored.
There are the obviously bad actors from Slytherin (just, all of them really), but Harry and Ron dislike Neville, Percy and most of the other students for no real reason. “You’ve got to stand up to your bullies, Neville!” Ron says to him near the end of the book, after laughing at him for getting bullied. They even dislike Hermione until they all trauma-bond over the whole bathroom troll incident.
There are a few sweet moments when Harry and Ron are becoming friends, and when the main trio are working together during the challenges set up to protect the titular Philosopher’s Stone. But for much of the rest of the time Harry acts pretty mean and spoiled, if he’s showing any character at all, despite growing up with the horrible Dursleys. You’d think he’d be more into trying to make friends instead of creating a clique with Ron akin to Malfoy and his cronies. Sometimes it feels like like his fame immediately went to his head after learning about it, and it never goes away.
Final Ratings & Conclusion
Plot: 3/5
Lots of events in quick succession, basically a new “crisis” to be solved every chapter or so. That’s fine, but the many holes and inconsistencies, especially simply for the sake of plot, brings it down to just being “okay.”
World: 3/5
Rowling had a scattering of good ideas, very few of which are executed well. The fandom has fixed and improved a lot of things through collective imagination, but the book doesn’t actually match up to that.
Characters: 3/5
Whether “good guys” or “bad guys,” many of the characters act like petulant children, even the adults. There are some good moments, but I found most of the characters generally unlikable, and not in a fun way.
Would I Read It Again?
No. I’m happy to be done with Harry Potter for the foreseeable future.
It’s really just a middling book at best. If someone asked me for fantasy book recommendations for 10-12 year olds, I would definitely suggest other options. But if a child decided they wanted to read it, I wouldn’t shoot the idea down. It’s fine, and if it gets kids reading that’s great. And they’ll eventually run out of books in the series and need a broader reading list anyway.
But if you’re really just looking for magical, fantastical worlds, there are plenty of other books out there that are better written and developed, and by less problematic people. Like, just pick up anything by Tamora Pierce. Or the Redwall Saga. Maybe something by Sir Terry Pratchett. Or even Ursula K. LeGuinn’s Earthsea series—which might be a bit tough for a 10-year-old, but they’re pretty PG. And that’s just some of the more famous ones.
I’ve got a couple more very fantastical books coming up in this year’s theme that I’m really looking forward to.
Read: February 2025