Synopsis:

Harry Potter, along with his best friends, Ron and Hermione, is about to start his third year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Harry can’t wait to get back to school after the summer holidays. (Who wouldn’t if they lived with the horrible Dursleys?) But when Harry gets to Hogwarts, the atmosphere is tense. There’s an escaped mass murderer on the loose, and the sinister prison guards of Azkaban have been called in to guard the school…

Rating:

Review:

This book is the bridge for the entire rest of the series. While we flirted with darkness and dark magic in Chamber of Secrets, this one plunges us right into the depths of darkness and sets up the tone for the rest of the series. It is often cited as people’s favorite book of the series, and I certainly understand why.

Harry has a real transformation in this book as well. He is forced to reckon with his parents and their death. But he also has to reckon with negative opinions about his parents. This is actually one of my pet peeves with this book series, the idolization of Lily and James Potter. It makes sense why Harry idolizes them. He never knew them, he only ever hears positive things about them, so it’s an easy thing to put them on a pedestal in his head. But everyone else does it too. They speak about them like they were saints. But, let’s face it, when they were in school they were jackasses. James was a bully and a psychopath. The “prank” that James and his friends pull on Snape is cruel, vindictive, and could have gotten him killed. Much more than just schoolyard pranks, they were awful. And Lily rejected Snape because he wasn’t useful to her anymore and to gain James’ favor. Even if they changed A LOT in their adult years, they are certainly not the saints that the series likes to portray them as.

Anyway, off of that rant. Going back to this book I also realized what a raw deal Professor Trelawney got in this series. No one takes her seriously. No one. McGonagall is downright disdainful to her, in front of students, which is unusual for her as a character. The students don’t take her seriously or respect her. Even Dumbledore gets impatient with her, even though he was the one who witnessed the prophecy about Voldemort. The prophecy that this started the entire series! In reality she’s actually a pretty good Seer. From telling Parvati to beware the red haired man, since she and Padma are twins, she merely got them confused but was correct about the prediction itself. When she says that “around Easter one of our number will leave us forever” and sure enough that’s when Hermoine stomps out of class and never returns. Even the warning “when 13 dine together the first to rise is the first to die.” What Trelawney didn’t realize is that there already WERE 13 people at the table, before she got there. Ron had Scabbers, who is not actually a rat. Dumbledore rises to greet her, he was the first to rise and was the first to die of those people. This happens in Order of the Phoenix too, 13 Order members have dinner, Sirius is the first to leave….he dies later on in the book. She deserves more respect, she’s a damn good Seer.

Alright, I went off on another tangent. Although I still wonder how NO ONE put it together that Hermoine was involved in Buckbeak and Sirius escaping. The Ministry had to give permission for her to have the Time Turner, McGonagall knew. Some of the other teachers had to suspect, they aren’t idiots. If they were talking in the staff room and mentioned her being in their classes at the same time…someone must have suspected. But then, nobody really wanted to look into it too much I suppose. The teachers, except for Snape, would have protected Hermoine. The ministry had bigger problems on their hands, like the fallout from Sirius escaping in the first place. Which is the most likely answer, they had other things to worry about.

Last tangent, I promise. I’ll end this simply. I love this book. I find it one of the most compelling of the entire series. It sets up everything for the story to move forward.