Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #233621 in Books
• Published on: 2004-07-06
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 540 pages

Synopsis
This is a magical, unofficial companion to the "Harry Potter" series that will help you enjoy the adventures more thoroughly. Learn about the wizard lifestyle, get to know Hogwarts inside and out and discover everything you ever wanted to know about Animagi. Descriptions, definitions, maps, timelines and additional commentary will guide you every step of the way.

Customer Reviews

Essential companion or not?
I found this book by accident and bought it without knowing much about what was in it - and I'm glad I did. If you are a Harry Potter fan then it's a pretty-much essential purchase - but there are a few caveats.

It's basically a HP encyclopedia; every piece of factual information from books 1-5 has been compiled into various sections (Ministry of Magic, Hogwarts, etc). And I mean EVERY detail. Every name. Every book. Every spell. All the backstory is pulled together. There are maps of Hogwarts and Hogsmeade, plans of the Minstry and the Dursleys' house, a VERY comprehensive timeline, family trees, etc, etc. It's exactly the type of book that I wished I'd had as I read through the HP books and made pages of scribbled notes. It's not a substitute for the books, but exactly what it says it is - a "companion".

Now the caveats.
Some of the detail in here is not strictly "canon" - there are many assumptions and "logical extrapolations". Just because you read it in here, don't assume that it has been explictly stated in the HP books.
The design is awful. I know that this is mainly because it's a small-press (or even self-published?) work, but even so...the cover is beyond awful and will do the book a great disservice. The internal illustrations are childish. The plans and maps look like they have been drawn by hand on graph paper. There is not enough spacing in the text - everything looks cramped; the density of the text will certainly be off-putting to younger children. This all seems a little strange, because the proofreading and editing seem to be fine. I can't believe a bigger publisher didn't pick this work up.
With Book 6 out, some of the detail is obviously wrong/out of date. This could obviously be corrected with a later edition - hopefully with a bigger publisher.

So...buy this book. But cover it with brown paper to disguise the monstrosity of a front cover picture. Please don't let the picture on this page put you off!