I was totally prepared to love Order of the Phoenix to bits. Sadly, Harry Potter’s fifth outing is about as disappointing a book as I’ve ever read. It’s not that it’s a bad book, far from it. It’s that it could have been a lot better.

I’m not going into spoilers (much), but suffice it so say it’s more or less exactly the same book as the previous Harry Potter books. Except Harry, Ron and Hermione are in a bad mood for most of the book.

As before, Hagrid gets himself into trouble. Except this time I can’t for the life of me imagine what Hagrid actally *did* that was useful. As a matter of fact: there’s a number of subplots in the book, most of them involving Hagrid, that should have been cut–and that make me wonder whether there was an editor involved with this book at all.

Also as before, the person you expect to be the bad guy isn’t. Only now I was expecting that, so the revelation didn’t come as a big surprise.

The one thing J.K. Rowling has let slip, is that one important protagonist dies. And that she was totally devastated after having “killed” that person. Well, that only goes to show she’s more attached to the people she writes about than her readers. Or at least this reader. The death was irrelevant, not particularly interesting or even necessary, and the person who died was thoroughly unsympathetic by the end of the book anyway.

Oh well, too bad.
I’ll have another go at Harry Potter in a few years’ time.