Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets Reviews

I love this book, of course I do, but the fact remains that this book prominently featured two of my most hated Harry Potter characters. Ginny Weasley and Dobby. There, I said it. I hate them both. In my Harry Potter hate list, Ginny and Dobby probably rank somewhere below Umbridge and Peter Pettigrew. Yeah, you heard me. I hate them that much.

The reason I hate Ginny is---well, never mind. I don't want to start another shipping war here, the last one was terrible enough, so let the reason for my hatred be implicit and unsaid.

Dobby is freaking annoying, yo. All his eagerness and shit - and yeah, I know what happens in the end. Doesn't matter. I still hate Dobby. Dobby is the equivalent of fingernails on chalkboard for me. If he had been my elf, I'd have given him a sock already so he could his whimpering, sniveling ass out of my life. He means well, I know he does, it's just that he's such a frustratingly well-meaning bumbling idiot.
“You know what, Harry? If he doesn’t stop trying to save your life he’s going to kill you.”
Aaaaaaaand one final note.
“Ginny!” said Mr. Weasley, flabbergasted. “Haven’t I taught you anything. What have I always told you? Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain?"
No particular reason I included that, except for the fact that it reminded me of my ex-boyfriend :3

The Chamber of Secrets is a great novel. You get more involved in the wizard world outside of Hogwarts, and see how a wizarding family differs from muggles.
Then there's the point that starts the Harry/Ginny plot. It's just full of awesome.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets opens with Harry pining for the end of summer recess so that he can return to Hogwarts. It is there where his friends are, and it is there that he is happy. There is no happiness in the home in which he lives with his uncle and aunt, the Dursleys, where he is in general looked down upon and mistreated. Harry's own parents are deceased and he has been taken in by his uncle and aunt, who treat him as a second-rate citizen. Shades of Cinderella. They might even treat him worse than they do except that they fear his powers of magic.

When I first read this book, I wasn't quite as fond of it as I had been of the first. The new teacher was painful, and the darkness seemed too dark. Still, the magic was still there, and over the years, it has grown on me. Not the least because of a certain blond in the movie version.

For me, this second story boils down to two points - the Malfoy family, and Tom Riddle.

I'm a great fan of the Malfoy family, and the details we get about how the family works in this story are quite lovely. Not only the father/son relationship between Lucius and Draco, but also their place in the world, and far more details about their beliefs.

And then there is Tom Riddle. I won't go into too much detail here to avoid spoiling others, but I'm very fond of Rowling's flashbacks in this series, and this book is the beginning of those. The history of Tom, and of the Chamber, lend so much to the later books that there is no way to unwind it all until you have read the very last of the books.

One of my major quibbles with Rowling's work is that she seems inclined to write off her dark characters as irredeemable, no matter what their crime. Whether they be Slytherin or from a dark family. This is the beginning of that. There were moments in this book where she might have planted the seeds of any of these characters' salvations, but she did not.

Still, even with that flaw, this early part of the story is fascinating. I quite recommend it.