Harry Potter is the most sold novel of all times. It has so far been translated into 30 languages and has sold more than 13 million copies worldwide. This is a success that has so far been unseen in the history of books. Kids and adults are reading and loving it and hundreds of Harry Potter-fan clubs have been founded.

But there is also an other side of this story of global success. Even the though the book received a lot of good criticism still there are people so strongly disagreeing with its context that they banish it from public libraries or out of their kids‘ rooms. Also critics are talking about weak points in the plot of the the first book „Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s stone“. Anyways the book has caused heated debates between fans and critics. I tried to divide those matters into three main topics that are as followed.
 

Reactions to Harry Potter

Mostly the people that read Harry Potter love the book. I personally have not met one person that read it and didn‘t start reading the second one because reading was so exciting. Figures are proving that. Harry Potter jams all the charts for novels where the newest book is always at the first place and is then closely followed by the others. It was sold 16,853 times in its first 100 minutes (see „Spotlight“ issue 1/00, "The magical world of Harry Potter" by Christine Madden) The big majority of the critics is full of compliments on the book.

Still there are lot of people that complain about the book. Newspapers like the famous New York Times or The Sunday Times took it off their bestseller lists. Schools mainly in the USA are taking it of the shelves of their school library and even a protestant parish in Germany put it on the list of banned books. But why are those people fighting against such a book that is obviously the most loved book in this decade if not even century? This already leads to the next topic.
 

Dangerous ideas in Harry Potter (?)

Mostly this book is criticised for dealing  with things kids shouldn’t read about. For one thing Harry is a wizard and has to learn how to do spells, curses, potions and so on. A lot of (mostly religious) people think this is not very good. They are afraid that children would start to believe in witchcraft on their own.

The second thing is that Harry always lacks a certain kind of respect towards adults. He doesn´t follow the instructions of the teachers at school if he thinks he really has to do so. And even though he gets caught in the act sometimes he never get punished too hard and gets away with it again. This also could mislead kids maybe to disobedience or even worse. One aspect even that I found in the internet is that a lot of people don’t like the character of Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts. They think he is like a god in Hogwarts and that God in biblical meaning is missing totally. I cannot give any examples for that because in my opion this is either very far fetched or very stupid.

Another thing, may be even the most important one, is the feelings the wizards and witches have towards the muggles (if you still don’t know that word by now even though I doubt it, muggle is the word for the non-magic people). Wizards feel sorry for muggles because they are so helpless. They are the total superior to them. Some even are openly prejudiced against them and don’t want to speak even to wizards that are not born into pure-blooded wizard families. A lot of people are offended by this idea. Because we are those weak sorry muggles and a whole lot of people don’t want the put be down like that. (even though the story is fiction). It also is a very racist way of thinking.
 

Weaknesses within the book

A lot of people say that there are weaknesses in the book. I cannot definetely say if that is true because everybody has his own point of view. So I will just list them all so everybody can judge for himself.
A lot of people say that the plot in the book is very unbalanced. Meaning that Harry Potter from one page to the other switches from the most popular guy in school (after winning the quidditch game against Slytherin, pg. 243) to the most unpopular one. (e.g. after losing 150 points in the house cup, pg. 264) And the emotions everybody is feeling are mostly extreme (Snape doesn’t just only dislike Harry - he loathes him! Pg. 149), Sometimes these things seem a little bit unreal even though they succeed in making the book more exciting.

There are a lot of stereotypes in the book, too. A lot of them are very common. Best example is Harry himself or better how he becomes a wizard. He lives in the muggle world with mean relatives, is poor and has no friends („ At school Harry had no one.“ pg. 38). Then he is rescued by a mysterious but friendly guy. Doesn’t that sound like Cinderella? You can say that Rowling at least borrowed the idea from a lot of fairy tales and old mythologic stories (e.g.: unicorns and centaures are part of the greek mythology). In every character in the book you find a perfect but fitting stereotype. There is the humangious Hagrid (description on pg. 55; and what goes with the attribute gigantic? Kind, brave, friendly and a little dumb! And it all fits!). Then there is Ron for example. He is the typical best friend. A good guy, intelligent, funny, brave, but always a little less brave and good than Harry. Those stereotypes are easy to recognize if you want to look for them. Still even though there are many of them they all fit into the story perfectly.

One weakness I found was that Harry sometimes does really odd things. At the first moment you ask yourself why is he doing such a stupid thing. Because no normal person would do that and then you think about it and you realize that he had to do it in order to get himself into a dangerous situation to keep the excitement for the reader on a high level. That for one thing is a big weakness in the plot I think because it spoils the picture of him (I found a good proof for this, but unfortunately it is in the second book when Ron and Harry drive the flying car to Hogwarts. That is a pretty stupid idea because they almost get Ron’s father fired from his job plus they could have easily waited for Ron’s parents to come back. And then they could have used flea powder or something else to travel to Hogwarts). Some people even talk about people disappearing for good and then reappearing in the book again. We found that on a Harry Potter website but cannot give the names of the people dissappearing.
 

Comment

I have to agree that there are mistakes in the Philosopher’s Stone. But they are leight weight compared to heaps of fun you have reading the book. If you look real hard you will find mistakes in every book.

Everybody is just talking about all the mistakes in Harry Potter because it simply is the most sold novel in the world. And everybody talks about it anyways. You don’t have to dissect everything, just read it. It is still -  even though a lot of adult people are reading it - only a childrens´ book. Of course there are things like the feelings against muggles or the imbalance in Harry Potter that are not very good. But I don’t know if that is so bad. After all it is just fiction and not something to be taken seriously. So if people get aggravated by that, then they shouldn’t read the next one. But I’m already looking forward to it and nobody can spoil me that (OK the last sentence is slang somehow but I can’t express that any other way!).