I’ve classified this as a review, but it isn’t really. There are acres of reviews on HP around, and I don’t mean for this to be one more. But I just finished the last Potter book and thought I’d share my biased thoughts with you on it. Biased, because every reader comes to a book with her own baggage. And that baggage may even change from one reading of the same novel to another, but it’s still there. So here are my own clouded thoughts.

Firstly, as I told J, reading Harry Potter for me is a lot like watching a trainwreck — painful but fascinating.

It’s not the sentence structure that gets me (Rowling has nothing on Dostoevsky for convoluted phrase-crafting); it’s not the child characters (I like Harry and Hermione, although I think Ron is a putz, and Lucius is exactly as he should be); it’s more the adults.

• I don’t like the concept of a little gang like Malfoy’s being allowed to run riot around the school with nothing beyond bland reprimands from the Hogwarts’ teachers.
• I don’t like the idea of a teacher, any teacher, being allowed to terrorise a class with impunity.
• The idea that Trelawney also is allowed to keep her position when she’s obviously completely incompetent just because she had one prophetic vision in the past is beyond pathetic.
• I detest completely and utterly the whole power hierarchy and artificial house loyalty actions that rampage through the books.
• And, last but almost at the top of my list, I abhor the way Dumbledore treats/treated Harry, pulling him out of scrape after scrape and treating him with such obvious indulgence it sets my teeth on edge.

Yes, you can tell me it’s only a story, but there are social undercurrents are there that I Really Don’t Like. The idea that power will win over everything (whether it’s Snape over his class, or Dumbeldore over the whole school), regardless of whether it’s right or wrong; that egalitarianism is dead (not that it was ever alive in Britain, tbh); that anything is excused if you think you’re on the side of Good.

Of course I’m painting in broad strokes — I’m blogging, not writing a thesis on the thing — but I find the series, as a whole, deeply disturbing. If I had a child attending Hogwarts who was neither Malfoy nor one of his cronies, or Potter or one of his cronies, the first thing I’d do would be to yank my child outta there and put her someplace else that doesn’t play its favourites so damned obviously and maliciously.

At the foundation of the reason for this dislike is also the fact that I belonged to school houses through most of my childhood education. While it may be a delicious novelty for N. American children, it was a given for anyone growing up in a British system (our son is in one now (Blue house), though thankfully only for Sports).

And it sucked.

Just as in the HP books, points were awarded and subtracted for good/bad behaviour, sports results, anything else of merit, and the banners were arranged on their little tree (first place to fourth place) in front of the entire school at the end of each week so you knew exactly where you stood. It’s a divide-and-conquer strategy that I consider to be petty, hateful, and cynically manipulative.

So that’s what I don’t like about Harry Potter. What I do like about it is one thing.

Even subtracting everything else, the one redeeming quality that permeates the books is love. Love of parents for their children; love of mentors for their young charges. Up till this point, I didn’t think English people held any great affection for their children, to be honest. At least, it was never evident through their books. Whether Enid Blyton or Philip Pullman, Tolkien to Kipling to Ballard to Willans & Searle, there’s always been a distance between the children and adults I used to read about, an apparent aloofness bordering sometimes on active dislike that — quite frankly — puzzles those not brought up in that society.

So it’s refreshing to read someone who’s not afraid to write characters who love, yearn, lose, gain, and grieve (okay, sometimes ad nauseam, but still …), and get support and strength from people quite alien in the average English children’s novel collection. Their parents. Or surrogate parents. Even the Malfoys are willing to defy Voldemort, in the face of worry for their son. I find that one solid thread through the series to be the saving grace of the books. The English have feelings. Who knew?

(Even though I loathe and detest the school system in the HP books (can you tell?), I would not stop my children from watching the movies or reading the books. My personal dislike is, imo, not good enough reason to stop their acquisition of knowledge.)