She’s not really a great author? She’s an okay children’s author, who a lot of us have a tie to because we grew up with the series - but a great deal was tied into shred marketing. Scholastic and Warner Bros have a good deal of responsibility in making the series what it was.
The Deadly Hallows and the Horcruxes are both the most massive ass pulls in history. Cut most of books 5, 6, and 7; make the prophecy true but applicable to Neville; have Harry die at the end. Infinitely better.
The first four books are decent kids literature. “Monster of the week” stories are fun. Hogwarts is very appealing for escapism, the castle and the food are the kinds of place your imagination (and the marketing) can fill in where Joanne can’t.
I’m not going to lie and say that I didn’t have a great fucking time when I went to Universal (this was pre COVID, I think she was a bit anti trans then but someone else was paying anyway). I would love to be a Ravenclaw - I can picture myself making a case that I should be allowed in the Restricted Section of the library, or borrowing a Time Turner to take multiple classes at once, or just the feasts (the unofficial cookbook can’t make it real, unfortunately. Most butter beers are fine enough.)
It works when we aren’t thinking too hard. When the characters can be stock, never grow and everything resets at the end. (I started the series with Book 2 as a child, and it had zero impact.)
She just can’t think about larger picture things. Her worldbuilding is ad hoc, based on whatever seems fun at the time. This is very fun when it’s a series of loosely connected one offs. It just doesn’t cohere as a story though.
It’s like The Boxcar Children or Junie B Jones or whatever the one that has like the time traveling tree house or whatever.
Like, I remember being excited to get Order of the Phoenix. I was the kind of Harry Potter fan that showed up to the last two book’s midnight releases, as well as the film. I have been “sorted” in costume. I don’t even feel cringe about this because it was fun. The fandom has made the series much cooler than it actually was. (HP famously got kids to read; playing Quidditch in gym was probably the only moment that class was not pure dhukka for me.) I say on this to make the point that my critique of her writing goes with a general appreciation of the series.
She’s a DM with ADHD. What the story is doing doesn’t matter, we’re just vibing. Some of the ideas are so fun and compelling that we’re bound to explore them further (there is some really compelling Left Behind fan fiction.)
The last three books just drop off in quality immensely. I wonder if some aspects of Half Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows are due to “George Lucas” syndrome - the editor can’t say “no” anymore. You can tell she’s trying very hard to make it seem like it was planned - “oh Tom Riddle’s diary was a part of this! Time to come up with a bunch of other McGuffins!”
Harry Potter doesn’t have any overarching narrative in the same ways that Warrior Cats, The Dark is Rising, Deltora Quest, or The Hunger Games series do. I guess you can include Chronicles of Narnia but that “overarching narrative” is literally a metaphor for C S Lewis’s beliefs about world history and religion. (A Horse and His Boy is a book I loathe the the point I seldom engage with the series.)
Voldemort is just a poorly characterized villain.
The narrative falls apart because there’s no reason for him to do what he does. This is fine in silly “monster of the week” stories, not overarching narrative stories.
The motivation in the first four books is that he wants to live forever, because everyone kinda does, but he’ll do fucked up and evil things to get there. We can have stories where he is trying to come back but isn’t really a threat, everything is very low stakes.
The last three books try to steer us into the “overarching narrative” course. The big reveals as far as his true character tell us he’s cursed and evil essentially because he’s a mixed race baby, conceived in a rape by someone analogous to “white trash.” He’s insecure of his mixed race status, so he creates a fascistic cult and wants to institute a supremacist authoritarian government.
That is a very fascinating and interesting character, but unfortunately Joanne does not understand race at the level of complexity writing that kind of villain requires. She also does not have the kind of grace and empathy for human beings that are required to write such stories. It’s also not what the series was, so the tonal shift comes across as awkward as the time I used a racial slur in a short fiction piece in high school to come across as a serious author.
And when you compare her work to the standards of adult writing: she had to drop the pseudonym on her mystery novel when it wasn’t selling well. Remember how King did that with some pretty good work? Wonder where she got the idea from. She’s not a fan (anymore…)
She’s not a good writer, and I am saying this as someone who likes* the series.
She’s not really a great author? She’s an okay children’s author, who a lot of us have a tie to because we grew up with the series - but a great deal was tied into shred marketing. Scholastic and Warner Bros have a good deal of responsibility in making the series what it was.
The Deadly Hallows and the Horcruxes are both the most massive ass pulls in history. Cut most of books 5, 6, and 7; make the prophecy true but applicable to Neville; have Harry die at the end. Infinitely better.
The main good thing about the series is its long and time consuming.
The first four books are decent kids literature. “Monster of the week” stories are fun. Hogwarts is very appealing for escapism, the castle and the food are the kinds of place your imagination (and the marketing) can fill in where Joanne can’t.
I’m not going to lie and say that I didn’t have a great fucking time when I went to Universal (this was pre COVID, I think she was a bit anti trans then but someone else was paying anyway). I would love to be a Ravenclaw - I can picture myself making a case that I should be allowed in the Restricted Section of the library, or borrowing a Time Turner to take multiple classes at once, or just the feasts (the unofficial cookbook can’t make it real, unfortunately. Most butter beers are fine enough.)
It works when we aren’t thinking too hard. When the characters can be stock, never grow and everything resets at the end. (I started the series with Book 2 as a child, and it had zero impact.)
She just can’t think about larger picture things. Her worldbuilding is ad hoc, based on whatever seems fun at the time. This is very fun when it’s a series of loosely connected one offs. It just doesn’t cohere as a story though.
It’s like The Boxcar Children or Junie B Jones or whatever the one that has like the time traveling tree house or whatever.
Like, I remember being excited to get Order of the Phoenix. I was the kind of Harry Potter fan that showed up to the last two book’s midnight releases, as well as the film. I have been “sorted” in costume. I don’t even feel cringe about this because it was fun. The fandom has made the series much cooler than it actually was. (HP famously got kids to read; playing Quidditch in gym was probably the only moment that class was not pure dhukka for me.) I say on this to make the point that my critique of her writing goes with a general appreciation of the series.
She’s a DM with ADHD. What the story is doing doesn’t matter, we’re just vibing. Some of the ideas are so fun and compelling that we’re bound to explore them further (there is some really compelling Left Behind fan fiction.)
The last three books just drop off in quality immensely. I wonder if some aspects of Half Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows are due to “George Lucas” syndrome - the editor can’t say “no” anymore. You can tell she’s trying very hard to make it seem like it was planned - “oh Tom Riddle’s diary was a part of this! Time to come up with a bunch of other McGuffins!”
Harry Potter doesn’t have any overarching narrative in the same ways that Warrior Cats, The Dark is Rising, Deltora Quest, or The Hunger Games series do. I guess you can include Chronicles of Narnia but that “overarching narrative” is literally a metaphor for C S Lewis’s beliefs about world history and religion. (A Horse and His Boy is a book I loathe the the point I seldom engage with the series.)
Voldemort is just a poorly characterized villain. The narrative falls apart because there’s no reason for him to do what he does. This is fine in silly “monster of the week” stories, not overarching narrative stories.
The motivation in the first four books is that he wants to live forever, because everyone kinda does, but he’ll do fucked up and evil things to get there. We can have stories where he is trying to come back but isn’t really a threat, everything is very low stakes.
The last three books try to steer us into the “overarching narrative” course. The big reveals as far as his true character tell us he’s cursed and evil essentially because he’s a mixed race baby, conceived in a rape by someone analogous to “white trash.” He’s insecure of his mixed race status, so he creates a fascistic cult and wants to institute a supremacist authoritarian government.
That is a very fascinating and interesting character, but unfortunately Joanne does not understand race at the level of complexity writing that kind of villain requires. She also does not have the kind of grace and empathy for human beings that are required to write such stories. It’s also not what the series was, so the tonal shift comes across as awkward as the time I used a racial slur in a short fiction piece in high school to come across as a serious author.
And when you compare her work to the standards of adult writing: she had to drop the pseudonym on her mystery novel when it wasn’t selling well. Remember how King did that with some pretty good work? Wonder where she got the idea from. She’s not a fan (anymore…)
She’s not a good writer, and I am saying this as someone who likes* the series.