Monday, June 3, 2013

Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone Part 1

In order to once again prove that I am not merely writing a blog about video-games, this week I review a book. By the way, if you don't want spoilers I'll have to make another review someday because I can't really do the amount of critiquing I want to if I try to stay out of spoilerville.
The first thing that perplexes me is why they even changed the name in the US, when "Philosopher's Stone" refers to the object that turns normal metals into gold and normal liquids into The Elixir of Life, and the only place that The Sorcerers Stone is ever referenced is in the American localisations of Harry Potter and the X of Y. Anyways, since the edition I first read always called it "Philosopher's Stone", and that's the name of the mythological artifact used in literature by Nicholas Flamel.
So I'm currently on my latest yearly re-reading of the series and after rambling about the title for the last paragraph or so let's get on to the actual review.
Harry Potter is about a boy wizard with a mysterious past (at least to first-time readers) and an even more mysterious future even after you read book Seven. The plot is all well and good, but there are a ton of twists that catch you off guard, and if these twists were intentional and not just thrown in to mess with our heads at the last second I applaud Joan Rowling for her mad skills. If not, then I say that you pretty much hit the nail on the head for plot-twists. Something else is that the series as a whole made a habit of throwing curve-balls straight out of left field that make increasingly less sense as it goes on, but I'll get to those later. Every line is perfection to the point of the movies and games quoting it directly, and when I get around to reviewing the Philosopher's Stone movie I will also give whoever Percy Jackson And The Olympians into a movie what for.
By the way, sorry for the late release and sorry for multiple parts, I've been a little busy lately, had to deal with bugs in my room and then I couldn't come up with anything to say until it was late at night, and then I've been volunteering at the library today and that took up a lot of my time, so I'll apologize in advance for any delays in posting. I'll have the rest of these parts out soon.

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