Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

I have a deep dark secret. It's so against "the way things should be" that sometimes I feel like I must be a bad children's librarian for feeling this way. But I think it's time to come clean with my readers.

I do not love Harry Potter.

You may be wondering: How on Earth can this be? It's fantasy, and you love fantasy! And for crying out loud, it's Harry Potter! Everyone loves Harry Potter!

Yes, all of that is true. And it's not that I hate Harry Potter. I read and enjoyed the entire series, and the first three books are actually quite brilliant. But somewhere along the way I feel like J.K. Rowling stopped putting together an awesome series and started writing her own fan fiction. I truly think that the latter books in the series could have been edited down to a solid 500 pages or less rather than the 800+ pages they currently require. And when the books stopped being about Quiddich and Harry's schoolwork and started focusing more on fighting Voldemort, well I really just started to miss the happy, magical haven that Hogwarts had been.

More specifically, I really actively dislike the fifth book in the series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This particular book has a few major problems of its own. In this volume we basically transition from the younger, happier Harry to the older, darker, and more dangerous version. And that's really all it is: 800+ pages of transition as Harry deals with his grief and frustration. Harry spends a lot of time whining about how everything is so awful and while his reaction is honestly very normal for someone in his situation it doesn't make for very interesting reading. And don't get me started on the obnoxious convention in YA lit used here to simply leave the main character in the dark about what is really going on. So annoying.

Because I hated this book so much I absolutely refused to see the 2007 film version when it was released. But this weekend it happened to be showing on cable and I didn't have anything better to do, so I finally caved and gave it a shot. And I have to say, I was much more impressed with the movie than I expected to be. A lot of the details from the book were glossed over due to time constraints, but in the case of a this sort of plot this was actually a good thing. I give actor Daniel Radcliffe and the movie's writing team a lot of credit for making Harry seem legitimately angry and confused rather than selfish and whiny. There is quite a bit going on visually in this movie, and the climatic scene in the Department of Mysteries was especially interesting to watch. The movie still isn't perfect and - let's face it - it's still all transitional material. But I can honestly say that this is one of the few cases I've seen where the movie was better than the book.

Overall Grade for the Book: C
Overall Grade for the Movie: B
Book-to-Movie Adaptation: B+