Deborah Ross

Danger, baddie, magic…

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

issue 14 July 2007

Don’t care about Harry Potter. Don’t care about the children who love him. Don’t care about the middle-aged weirdos who read the books on the Tube. (Some muggles are too dumb for shame, even.) Don’t care about J.K. Rowling, although I will ask this about her: why does she always look so miserable? If you were worth £600 million would you look so miserable? Maybe she just pretends to look miserable, so we don’t feel more envious than we already are. Perhaps once she closes her front door behind her she dances down the hall exclaiming, ‘I’m so rich it’s unbelievable; I’m so rich it’s unbelievable’, before snacking on ground-diamond toasties and bathing in champagne.

Good luck to her and all that, but I just don’t get it. I half-read the first Potter book with my son but he got bored the moment Harry landed at Hogwarts on the grounds that: ‘if it’s magic and anything can happen, it doesn’t really count.’

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