The Discovery of A Magical World

On a street as dark as ink, there laid Harry Potter waiting in front of the doorstep ready to be found by his future family; spending the next ten years surviving in the shadow of his cousin Dudley, never knowing affection until the day of his eleventh birthday, when he was informed that he was a wizard and thus admitted into Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. He was accompanied by Hagrid to buy his out of the ordinary school supplies, subsequently stumbling into his future rival Draco Malfoy. While on the train to school, Harry met two of his future close friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger; the trio were joyfully sorted into the Gryffindor House by the sorting hat in the Great Hall. Harry took a shine to the flying lessons, at which he excelled and became the seeker of the Gryffindor House Quidditch Team to his delight.

Imagination is what I discovered after reading this book, it opened a world which I never knew, a world full of fantasy, action, and adventure, daydreaming frequently about being the main character, wanting to receive a letter written in emerald-green ink and have Hagrid utter the words “yer - a wizard Harry”. It was just one of my many dreams I had as a young child, but regrettably it’s an impossible one.

Quidditch is an intriguing game, which I would love to see in real life as it wouldn’t matter where you sit or stand in the stadium, you would be able to see the players flying on their brooms and there wouldn’t be a bad seat since the players fly everywhere because of there being more than one ball constantly in play. Although I do think by catching the golden snitch, the points that you get are a touch disproportionate compared to the other balls, which you can only get ten or twenty points, with the snitch once you catch it you can get one hundred and fifty points, so the seeker is undeniably important.

The most fascinating aspect of the book is wizard chess. When I read Ron and Harry playing wizard chess, I was quite confused in why it’s called “wizard chess” and not just plain old chess, until I continued reading. Then I understood that the chess pieces can physically move on their own, so you don’t have to use your hands and the chess pieces follow your instructions. Whereas if they aren’t confident with your instructions or if it’s an extremely bad play, then they won’t listen to you at all, which sounds a lot more interesting than the chess in our world. It’s something that completely blew me away. At the end-of-year feast, everyone was in a foul mood, because Slytherin seemed to have won the House Cup, yet it wasn’t over till the fat lady sang. Dumbledore incidentally added a “few” more points to Gryffindor, which just happened to make them win by a margin of ten points, and suddenly everyone was on cloud nine, of course except for Slytherin and Professor Snape. This was quite a surprising event, from which I derived great pleasure.

At first when I started reading this book, the contrast of Harry’s life before and after joining Hogwarts had captivated my interest. I was quite taken aback by Hagrid's accent, though it was an essential part of his character, it was slightly difficult to comprehend. The character that I disliked the most was Dudley, he’s the typical spoiled rascal who is a bully to anybody he dislikes just because he wants, which is extremely infuriating. I think about a third of the way through the story, the timeline unexpectedly started to hasten, and the ending was a bit abrupt and should have gone into a bit more detail, as the plot was getting better and better by the page. Gryffindor’s victory in the House Cup was the most exhilarating segment of the book; nevertheless, it was equally one of the disappointing segments, since there was too little detail after the defeat of Professor Quirrell. If the author had elaborated more in the final handful of pages, I would have loved the book even more.