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| Page 5 | Book Reviews - Children & Young Adults |
June 2005 |
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| Page 5 | Book Reviews - Children & Young Adults |
June 2005 |
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DVDs - Various Harry Potter
and The Order of the Phoenix
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By Alidë Kohlhaas Next to me lies one of the longest novels I have read recently. The only other two that come close to it are Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and Umberto Eco's Baudolino. This new book has kept my attention so focused that it hardly seemed 766 pages long. I am talking, of course, about Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. The fifth book in the Harry Potter series by J. K. (Joanne Kathleen) Rowling has lived up to expectations. Late in arriving on my desk, and hence excluded from my review of the previous four books, The Order of the Phoenix was worth the wait. In some ways more subtle in its tale than the previous four books in the series, it also has greater depth because Rowling introduces a teenaged Harry, who faces his first blush of infatuation with the opposite sex, and among his many trials, he has to cope with the death of a young friend, and worse, the death of someone older he loves and relies on. There is also the moment when Harry has to confront some truths about himself and who he is, and while he may hate living with his mother's relatives during the summer months, he has had to accept that he must return to the Dursleys on Privet Drive and put up with his nasty cousin Dudley until another school year begins. Rowling has taken this book to make her young readers familiar with life as it is, not as we wish it to be. People die in real life, young and old. This is a hard lesson to learn, not just for children. We all must learn to accept this fact, however much we struggle against such reality. She is careful in how she brings into the story Harry's crush for Cho, and then their estrangement. Harry, as so many youngsters in their early teens, is short on patience, ready to blow up and act out, and unwilling to be disciplined. Many a young reader will recognize himself or herself in this book, that is if they read the story carefully. From Harry, one hopes, they will learn that youthful rebellion is natural, but also often dumb— most of the time. It takes wisdom to know when and when not to rebel. There is more to The Order of the Phoenix, though. Rowling, in keeping with weighing good and evil—the Faustian element of her long tale— shows her young readers, and maybe even a few older ones, how a benign environment can change into the opposite. She introduces the idea of how a tolerant rule can turn into an intolerant one; how quickly, if we are not vigilant, a totalitarian regime can impose itself on a liberal one. The evil specter of Lord Voldemort is ever present, but only in the background. Unlike in the Goblet of Fire (Book Four), he makes no personal appearance. Instead, bad deeds are carried out by those who are either willing or unwilling, or worse, unknowingly, messengers on his behalf. The latter are represented by the bureaucratic members of the Ministry of Magic, who have refused to believe Harry's story that Voldemort has returned. Of course, as always, despite pain and anguish, there are always good moments, and the story, as all the other ones, ends on a positive note. Good has once more triumphed over evil. What is also great about The Order of the Phoenix, as all of the other Harry Potter books, is that it is filled with all sorts of wonderful words that young readers will have to look up in dictionaries. From what I have learned from talking to a few such readers is that they now love to look up words when before they just skipped over anything they didn't know. We may actually get to see a more literate generation growing up. A generation that knows more than just the 'F' word, and one that is able to overcome having to start and end every sentence with 'like'. Wouldn't that be great? Please note that there are also paperback versions of all of the Harry Potter books For a commentary about the books and its critics, click here |
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