It emptied my shelves and I was ungrateful about it

Two things are true at once here, and I've yet to manage both of them in one conversation.

The first is that it emptied my shelves. In the autumn of 1998 my reservation list ran to forty-one names, in pencil, on a card I kept because Denise said I'd want it one day. Children who had never voluntarily opened a book were arguing about house points in the corridor. I have never seen anything like it before or since, and anybody who was working in a school then will tell you the same.

The second thing: the writing is ordinary. Serviceable, fast, and borrowing heavily from a school-story tradition that was already secondhand when Blyton got at it. The plot turns on an adult withholding information for no reason a grown reader can accept. Quirrell's turban is silly. The Dursleys are pantomime and never stop being pantomime.

Does the second thing matter? Not much, at eleven. It mattered to me because I had to keep a straight face while parents told me their child was now a reader, when what their child actually was, was a reader of this.

Seven. It did far more good than harm and I'd not talk a child out of it. I only wish more of them had gone on somewhere else afterwards. A good many didn't.