My sons are fighting over who gets to read it first. Actual conversation, circa mid-September. For an adult who wants to know what the kids are up to, the Harry Potter books should actually be read in order. The best is the first, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, an astonishing, well-written, moving and funny tale of a mistreated orphan boy who's rescued by Britain's secret community of witches and wizards and whisked off to boarding school to learn the art.
Wonder is piled upon wonder.
There are fabulous pets - strange cats, cowardly rats, toads and owls, who aren't messengers of doom but merely messengers, carrying packages and letters from home. There's the oddest teaching staff one will ever encounter, including a ghost - a teacher who had died giving a lecture so boring that nobody, not even the teacher himself, noticed he'd gone incorporeal. And there's a truly evil villain, a brilliant wizard who went over to the Dark Side soon after graduation from Hogwarts, tried to kill baby Harry after finishing off his parents, and is still after Harry, one way and another. The element of danger runs through all three of the Harry Potter books. But the rest of this parallel world rings true on a continent where conversing with the spirit world is not unusual.