Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets (spoilers)

[kate_nepveu]

Proposition: the reason that Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is less interesting than the first book is that the story is mostly about someone other than Harry.

Discuss.

(Alternatively, what the heck was Bloomsbury UK thinking with the kids-version cover art for the seventh book? (See also: US version.))

ETA: I've booklogged this book & its predecessor.

Comments

[abigail-n.livejournal.com]

I like the second book a great deal more than the first. There's a sense of menace in Chamber that's completely absent in Stone, with its seven impossible tasks that present three eleven year olds with only a minor challenge.

But I would agree that the difference in quality also has something to do with the books' respective focus. Harry is, by far, the series' least interesting character, and the books work best when he's acting as an observer, our window to the history of the wizarding world and his own extended family.

[kate_nepveu]

I was surprised that in listening to the first book, I got a better sense of Harry's personality than I'd remembered from reading them. But generally, yes, he's a youth-shaped hole in the story for readers to step through--which is not necessarily a bad thing, as you say.