Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

[Occhidiangela]

JK Rowling and Robert Jordan both have JR as their initials, one forwards and one backwards? Coincidence, even given that in Jordan's case it is a nom de plume? Methinks not, as they both suffer from the same malady: editors who haven't the sack to make them tighten up their prose. ~600~ pages would have sufficed, JK, you are killing trees needlessly with your verbosity. More words dont add clarity, the right words, and fewer of them, guarantee clarity. 800+ pages after starting, I have come to the conclusion that "More is better" is more than a tired old Iggy Pop lyric, it is a statement of principle by publishers. Death to the trees!

Rogue Rating Service awards Harry Potter, part cinc, two and a half pints of Westmarch Bitters out of a possible five: Ogden, please pour the half pint on Ms Rowling's head, and pour the two full ones all over her editor. While Gillian cleans up the mess, get me a Kingsport Red, I need to wash a few adjectives out of my brain.

Minor Spoilage

On the bright side:

The significance of Harry's Scar is revealed.

Harry has to deal with the problem of being a 14 year old boy and how 'girls' figure into that condition. While cliche, it fits the established story line.

Fred and George add some badly needed light moments

Neville Longbottom finally shows why he in the story at all. Ginny Weasley becomes more than 'Ron's little sister.'

Assault on the contemporary problem (US and UK, I presume) regarding interference of government "know nothings" with serious education. Heavy handed, but it resonates.

One gets a firm sense that there won't be any more than seven books.

Death Eaters show up to battle the good guys! Aurors show up to fight Death Eaters. Yay, Battle!

Dumbledore stacks a few arses before he is done, and shows a flash or two of why Voldemort feared/fears him.

No smut, thank goodness, given that at 14, hormones tend to be all the rage.

Rowling takes the piss out of the media, again.



Down Side:

Dobby the house elf makes a re-appearance.

Rita Skeeter shows up.

Adverb and adjective overload, this book is nearly impossible to read aloud without now and again screaming "Chrikey, woman, learn how to write!" The kids are enjoying it anyway, thanks to a few ad libs now and again . . . did I say that? :o

Jordanesque detail on trivial nonsense abounds. Doxey's are added for zero value other than to have magical pests. The point being . . . what?

Everyone seems to be pissed off at some point or other, a change in tone that either is an attempt to put more depth into characters or a sign that Rowling is running out of ideas. Not sure, but the use of all CAPS for the shouting screams at me: this is a book, not the internet!

A few favorite characters take it on the chin, to a greater or lesser degree. Maybe that should be "Bright Side." Hmmmmmmmmm.

Deus ex machina anyone?

Reference made to Ministry of Magic dealing with Muggle Prime Minister. Uh, that violates entire plot premise of "we are trying not to be seen!"

Overly stupid antagonists.

Christmas in the land of Wizards. Sorry, that dog won't hunt.

Overly long, and redundant, explanation and exposition at the end. *Sigh*

Not enough dead bodies lying about after the magical battles take place. Those wands are deadly weapons, they are!

Hermione and Ron can't get out of their rut, and Ron apparently has no testosterone, even at age 14.

Not enough Quidditch. :P

When all is said and done, and all carping aside, I am glad I read it, since I will be talking it over with my two young'ns and am bound to read quite a bit of it aloud, as we did with the other four books. (We now all take turns, rather than me doing all of the reading.)

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix will also make a great doorstop, leaf presser, and photo protector, so at least it is a multi use book.

If you like the series, it's worth a look, if you have not read any of the others, don't start with this one unless you want to be convinced not to read any of the others!

[Executor]

Reference made to Ministry of Magic dealing with Muggle Prime Minister.  Uh, that violates entire plot premise of "we are trying not to be seen!"

Just a small nit here: this first came up in the third book, so nothing new. I think the way it was explained was that if the PM told anybody about how the leader of a secret community of wizards had talked to him, no one would believe him anyway.

That said, I almost completely disagree with your overall assessment of the book, though some of the individual points are good ones. Taking it all together, this is a fine addition to the series, though if I recall from some of your past posts, you don't like the series very much anyway.

[Medicine Man]

My 2 cents:

I tore through Order of the Pheonix in record time and enjoyed myself doing it. On that level, the fifth book of the Harry Potter series passed the litmus test of entertainment literature. That having been said, I do not really feel that it was JK Rowling's best work to date; unlike the previous three sequels which I felt raised the bar a little bit with each iteration.

Occhi makes quite a few good points about where the fifth book was weak. The sheer length of the book is surely at the top of my list. I don't mind a long book, provided that the content is uniformly relevant and important. Quite a bit of the fifth book was excess verbage. It could have easily been 650 pages rather than 800.

I think some of this can be attributed to Rowling's efforts to flesh out and expand upon the world she has created. Similarily, the lack of violent deaths at the end can also be attributed to Rowling's desire to write intelligently about young people and real life issues without being too grim or harsh - something I've always regarded as a tough balancing act.

Ultimately, I don't think that any of the book's flaws are damning and I will most certainly be picking up the next one. I think I'll be a little bit worried if book 6 turns out to be 1000 pages though.

[Count Duckula]

Book #5: a Librarian's Perspective

I work in a library shelving books. My mother works in the same library processing the books to get them shelf-ready. We are notorious for our precision, our persistence, and our perspicacity in our chosen departments. We are the anal-retentive angels of the Rappahannock Regional Library, and by gum, we like that title. (Well, I do. Mom thinks it's "fitting", and nothing more.)

The only two reasons I wasn't on the Potter team assigned to get all 300 copies of the book shelf-ready: I worked all morning, and I wrap fluffy books. Work and wrapping skills run in the family. I, like my mother, can laminate a stiff-cover paperback with no air under the cover and--get this--no spinal bubbles whatsoever, but if I'm not adhering the wrapping tape firmly to my stomach, I'm sticking the book to the table, myself, my coworkers, anywhere but the wrapping. If the wrapping does indeed go on, the book contains enough air between the wrapper and the book itself to send an explorer safely down the Marianas Trench, provided the explorer didn't explode from the ocean pressure.

The Potter team convened on Thursday morning to handle the processing of the 300 library copies. Some books from special library-specific warehouses carried some pre-processing stamps and barcodes and such, but the 26 Rowlingware boxes arrived with little fanfare, unless you count one of the carts in the train that bore the boxes to 3rd floor for processing ran over the foot of the annoying younger child of the Acquisitions director. The child, the Acquisitions director, her assistant, two processors, the slowest Cataloguer West of the Pacos, and the branch manager formed the Potter team, and set to work on shelf-readying the books.

Meanwhile, I shelved juvenile fiction on the second floor of the library and listened to a coworker share the latest office rumors. The Powers-That-Be dispatched several pages to construct a Platform 9 3/4-style checkout booth for the magical Saturday when the 300 owned copes and 500 rental copies of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix officially entered circulation. The Circulation department head chose a diligent, intelligent, and rather potato-shaped page to dress up as Dumbledore, complete with mask and wig.

Calamity struck when, that afternoon, a copy of the book turned up missing. Disasterous! The library boasts nearly a hundred thousand patrons across seven different branches. The owned copies of the fifth book, reserved for Potter fans months before, barely shelf-ready for Saturday, and one just decided to walk off? Impossible!

The missing copy later appeared when searchers stumbled upon the eldest child of the head of Acquisitions, who took advantage of the eye of calm in the Pottermania storm to sequester herself away with the missing copy, determined to find out if the rumors about the dead lead character came true.

I elected to spend Saturday morning in bed. On Monday, I discovered that the madhouse lasted only two hours, and the pages on duty led the potato-shaped Dumbledore around, as the mask prevented any peripheral vision whatsoever. Pottermania came and went. And the anal-retentive angel survived.

(This post brought to you in the style of J.K. Rowling.)

(Occhi: No editor is going to suggest any edits for any of Rowling's books, for fear she'll get upset that someone doesn't like her latest brainchild, and go to an editor with lower quality standards. She has the same disease that's afflicted Danielle Steele and Stephen King: the name above the work means more than the work itself. Then there's also the "I'll do anything for fame and money" bit, but this budding author will now bite her facetious tongue on that matter. :P)

[Nicodemus Phaulkon]

Verbose or no, it held my attention for the two days it took to mow through it. As the fifth in the series, and known to be limited to seven, you understand that this is the Darkening, the middle part, the headlong rush into disaster. It will take the triumphant efforts of the seventh book to bring the Heroes out on top.

Classic. Predictable. Perfect.

Just as the operas of the masses centuries ago, a story must have elements of A, B and C, and must resolve itself via method 1 or method 2. Anything else, the crowd turns ugly... and you find yourself pulled out from under your quill and tossed into the street.

As much as I enjoy the ride of the HP phenomenon, I do keep in mind that it's the equivalent of a 'tween soap opera. We ARE talking about children's fiction, here, people. ;)

One of the guilty pleasures that I freely admit to enjoy.

[Occhidiangela]

For Executor

When all is said and done, and all carping aside, I am glad I read it,

When all is said and done, I like Diablo II as well, but we tend to complain about its blemishes. :P

If I did not like the series at all, I would not have bothered to read past book one. As it is, I enjoy sharing the story with the kids. My complaint centers around the authors "quantity" over "Quality" degradation, which is not an uncommon phenomenon these days.

You ought to see what I write about 'one star' out of five books. :P Well, you won't ever, because a book that bad doesn't even get a review.

[Brista]

Sign me up for the "two days of contented absorbtion" crew too :)

I think the crucial difference between Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time and JK Rowling's Harry Potter series is:

Wheel of Time is boring

I haven't read the last one or two, the one I stopped at I got half way and decided to read something else

I thoroughly enjoyed Wheel of Time at first but the fresh conventional fantasy of the early books has given to convoluted psychological angst, implausible and inexplicable behaviour from the characters for whom we once felt sympathy, the plot has got both too complicated and too repetitive to follow and the lack of structure is really making it seem like it's going to last forever

With Harry Potter 5, you pick up the book think "wow, it's big" but it steadily chugs along from the start of the 5th year till after the exams and you know where you are.

Also there are (presumably) just two more books to follow. If we then get 3 Harry Potter at University books and 40 Harry Potter's glittering career books I'll certainly throw in the towel but at the moment she's sticking to the structure if not the format and I'm perfectly content

I don't have quite as strong a feeling that I want more though, I remember feeling that very intensely after the first one

[Solostaran]

Though I wish I could have torn my way through the book in two days, it ended up taking my until yesterday, a whole 10 days. I rather enjoyed the book, though I must say I did feel slightly let down for some reason. Perhaps all of the rumors that I had heard (unwillingly) had in some way caused my to not allow my self to become very consumed with the book. I remember reading Goblet of Fire. I couldn't put it down. Unfortunatley I couldn't get nearly as in to Order of the Pheonix (though this may be because of my ongoing battle to become used to waking up at 6 am every morning during my "wonderful" summer vacation).

Minor Spoils
Things I was happy with:

Most all of what Occhi was happy with

Finally learning that Trelawney's prohphecy back in Book 3 (I think) was actually the real deal. While having to trudge through the final (and perhaps too long) two chapters, I found this to be one of the more satisfying "revelations." Though, I must admit, still a little confused by all of Dumbledore's ramblings.

Rowling really making Fred and George out to be naturally intelligent and talented. It was nice to see a Weasley actually do something for once ;) .

Learning that OotP was not printed on "Old Age Forestry."


Not so happy with:

The weight of the book. Not gonna lie, I had to take breaks to allow my arms some recuperation time. I like to lay down while reading and having to prop a book of that size up for any prolonged amount of time became a slight struggle.

All the rumors. I already knew that some of the parts that had the most potential to shock AND help me get into the story where going to happen. This seemed to seriously dampen my experience. Then the fact that JK was confirming some of the rumors...

All in all, I found this book to be a very nice read with just a few set backs. It didn't quite follow the "keep getting better" trend that has been previously mentioned, but it didn't ruin the series either. I look forward for the 6th entry into the series seeing as now I am lost on how to get any kind of Harry Potter Fix. I mean, I really don't enjoy the movies at all, and you can only read through the books every so often.

One last thought, not that it matters, but I can foresee some problems when it comes time to make the 5th book into a movie. It was a little more adult themed than the others, and I just don't see the movies going in that direction. Heck, if kids thought the second movie was scary, I can't even imagine what they may think about the 5th. Though, what do I care? While they are a pleasant watch, I haven't found any of the movies to be quite what they could just yet.

[Occhidiangela]

Rowling does indeed believe in plot advancement throughout the book.

At some time, I suspect book VII, Lord Voldemort will have to be defeated by either Potter or Dumbledore, or both. And Malfoy will go on to law school, or to get an MBA.

And at some point Potter and Snape need to, IMO, find a way to agree to disagree and remember that they are on the same side, even if they don't like each other. That bit of character development is needed, IMO, for Rowling to get a message across to her young readers: just because you don't like someone does not mean you can't work toegether now and again for a worthwhile aim.