Book Review: “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” by J.K. Rowling

Hey guys!

So you’re probably thinking in your head I’ve lost my mind about doing a book review on the very first Harry Potter book, but I have an explanation I swear!

I would say about 10 years ago – holy shit! It was during my last year in middle school, my English teacher wanted us to read Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone and then watch the film to compare what was kept and what was left out from the book. For many years, this was the reason why I had never read the books after watching the other movies. I had even tried reading Twilight but I couldn’t get past page 7 because I was doing so many comparisons in my head between the the characters!

Despite this, I have always wanted to read the rest of the Harry Potter series. And I knew that it has been several years since I last read the book, so I figured I should reread it, which is another thing that I rarely do! I never reread a book. I really surprised myself in what I’ve been doing as far as reading goes!

Before I go on talking about the changes in the book, I wanted to say that I know a lot of things about England; especially in the way they talk. The words that we use are different from the British. So as I was reading this book, I was very sad at the fact that I was reading it in the American way, but they still kept certain words the same as they do. For example, “holidays” is mentioned at the last. For us Americans, this means actual holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc. For the British, it means that as well but also “vacation” so couldn’t that have been changed too? I realize that not everybody is going to know that because we are the only ones that call “soccer”, when the rest of the world calls it “football”.

For a lot of people like myself, another thing that tends to hold a person back from reading a book after they’ve already watched the film based off of it, is that your outlook of the character is different. You’ll most likely see the actor who played them than anyone else. I did try my hardest to not see the actors and actresses that are now famous for playing these characters, but nobody can play a better Ron, Mrs. Weasley, Hagrid, Snape, and Professor McGongall. However, I was actually picturing different people for Heromine, Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, and even Harry himself! And I adore Daniel Radcliffe! So I think I can say I have officially thrown that theory out of the window!

Besides that, I do remember some things from the first time I read the book. I knew about the time when Harry’s letters start to arrive and when Mr. Dursley decides to move them away, they go to another place just before arriving on the island where Harry first meets Hagrid, but sadly this was all that I managed to remember. Recently I have seen this little meme on Facebook about if fans of the series would watch the movies if they were word for word, but as I was reading along I noticed that a lot of the dialogue was still the same between the two, it was just backwards! Yes, certain things in the chapters were cut out of the movies but it wasn’t a lot of material as I thought it was! Not everything can make it into the movies unfortunately!

Everything was mostly matching with the film as it was playing in my head! Once I got to Chapter 14 things started to really switch. It was a lot more than a couple of things that were changed from the book, by the time I hit the last two chapters I was a bit upset by the fact that they took certain things out. One in particular was the fact in the last chapter, you finally find out who gives Harry the invisibility cloak whereas in the films, you don’t know who gives it to him! I have never known who gave it to him until the day I finished the book.

Now that I have finished this, I am onto the one film that I hardly ever watch because of the whole spiders and serpents… And you might even get that review sooner than you think!

Have you read Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone? Or have you done what I did and just skipped ahead by watching the films? What are your thoughts about them?

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