Harry, A History: The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon [Paperback]

 

 

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I bought this book hoping for a straightforward & fun 'inside look' at Harry Potter, as the book's title seems to promise. Instead, I found an incredibly wordy and dry book. The first 8 pages alone are nothing more than an excruciatingly boring minute-by-minute detailing of the author's life as she waits for the announcement of when Deathly Hallows would be published. Other pages give word-for-word reconstructions of fights she had with her mother, or conversations with friends. There are occasional nuggets of interesting information - details about Rowling's struggle to get Harry Potter from a manuscript to a published book, for example - but the sheer multitude of pages of boring minutiae in between the nuggets kept me flipping pages in exasperation. In my opinion, this book amounts to little more than Anelli's quite boring memoirs, interesting only to fans of her website The Leaky Cauldron.

I wasn't really impressed with this book. I expected something different. I thought the book would be about "inside the HP phenomenon" and it was, sort of, but mostly it was about the author's life. If you are a Harry Potter fan, there are better books out there.

I am reading the most wonderfully, magnificent, incredible and enjoyable book I have read in ages. It is a breath of fresh air and I'm thrilled that I picked it up. I'm talking about Harry, A History by Melissa Anelli.

I remember the first time I read Harry Potter and The Philosophers Stone.

I had ignored the buzz surrounding Harry Potter for a long time. I remember thinking: No book could possibly be that good. I would see people reading it on the buss, on lunch breaks, line ups. "Bah," I would say. No book could be that good. And I ignored it still.

I'm not sure why I did now. I must have been annoying about it however because one day, my closest friend at the time handed me something. It was a gift certificate. "What's this for?" I asked her.

"If you won't read the damn book, let me buy it for you." She said.

"Which book?"

"You know damn well which book. You use this gift certificate to buy Harry Potter and The Philosophers Stone and nothing else. Then, if you don't like it, you didn't waste any money on it." She glared at me, daring me to argue. "Alright?"

I remember staring at her, unbelieving, and taking the time to light a cigarette before responding. "The book is that good?"

She nodded. "The best." She said. "Just read it and you'll see."

I did what she said. She and I had the same reading tastes and I figured if she said it was good, it probably was. A small part of me still doubted her. But I went to the bookstore at the mall downtown and picked up a copy of Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone. I hopped on a buss to go home and opened the book to the first page.

I remember being spellbound. I was held in place and all my focus was on the words on the pages in front of me. All that existed for me was Harry. I had found it. I had finally found home in the pages of a book.

I have the same feeling when I read Harry, A History by Melissa Anelli. Perhaps you can already guess at what it's about.

Anelli, popular web mistress of the award winning The Leaky Cauldron, a superb Harry Potter fan site, has penned a book of what the Harry Potter phenomenon was like from the inside out. She has written a stunning history of JK Rowling, the Harry Potter books and the Boy Who Lived. From the first page, I was pulled into what I knew was going to be a treat. I stopped walking and sat down in the middle of a mall on a hard metal chair, people milling about me, totally immersed in the words I was reading. Harry, A History pulled me in from the first words and didn't let go.

The writing is lively and invites the reader to sit, to read, to enjoy. It's lively and engaging and full of fact and tidbits of Harry's beginnings and it's first tentative steps and what it felt like for a fan, for any of us, to experience Harry Potter.

More than that though, it's a beautiful portrait of one woman's struggle to find herself, to find joy in books and finally, in the end, do something useful. It's a brilliant, literary page turner about something that brings joy to so many.

I started it last week and I am fifty pages away from finishing the book a second time. Though there were a lot of things I should have done today, there was nothing that I wanted to do more than read Harry, A History.

You can learn more about the book by visiting [...]

If you have ever read Harry Potter, or experienced it's life beyond the printed page, you will want to read Harry, A History. Trust me on this. I can't afford to give out gift certificates to all of you; so you're just going to have to take my word for it, okay?

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2.0 out of 5 stars Well Written, but geared towards Leaky Followers
I decided to read this novel because I wanted to learn more about the history of how the potter series became so popular along with statistics. Read more

Published on July 20 2009 by Trevor Chomyszyn

5.0 out of 5 stars a final dip into the harry potter world
As a huge Harry Potter fan, I have missed Harry Potter since the release of Harry Potter. This is the perfect book to bring some closure to the whole Harry Potter phenomenon. Read more

Published on Jan 31 2009 by Mary F Way

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