Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Harry Potter and the Camber of Secrets is a book written by JK Rowling, and the second in the Harry Potter series. Unfortunately, I saw the movie first, which I later viewed as a mistake, and for future movies, I made sure I read the book first.

Reviews

Good

• The new characters (Colin Creevey, Dobby, Lockhart) are quite fun.
• Hogwarts is still very exciting and wonderful.
• The Chamber of Secrets and Slytherin's heir are nice mysteries that slowly get solved as time goes on, and it keeps you guessing.

Bad

• The idea of students not being allowed to use magic outside of school doesn't make any sense. How can they study, do homework, or even keep their skills up during the holiday? And what's with the Ministry blaming Harry for using magic? This means they have the ability to detect when magic is used anywhere in the world at any time? Or, perhaps at any house where wizards live? But since they can't tell the difference between a house elf's magic and a student's magic, this surveillance would only be useful for houses where only underage magic users live with muggle parents.
• The wizarding world uses a lot of bigoted terms: pure blood, half blood, muggle, squib, mud blood, etc. and few people seem to care enough to make rules against it.
• Parseltongue is described as being extremely rare, but in a world where people can use magic to do pretty much anything they want, why would it be rare?
• The staff's inability to find the Chamber of Secrets for so long, even after it's been known to exist, is unbelievable considering how much divination the professors should have done.
• The victims of the attacks are incredibly lucky every time. Several attacks and nobody ever looks directly at the monster, and Harry is there to see most of them, and is then immediately discovered by other people.
• The additional details about the ghosts and Nearly-Headless Nick's Death Day party are interesting, but they weren't important to the story.
• Quidditch is even less feasible in this book. Apparently, you can buy a serious advantage over your opponents with better equipment, and the referees don't notice when a bludger has gone rouge and focuses on a single player over and over again.
• Why do you need a polyjuice potion when transfiguration spells can morph anything into anything else?
• The showdown between Harry and Tom seems to take forever while all his plans are slowly revealed.

Ugly

• The fact that school remains open while a dangerous unknown monster is roaming the halls is unbelievable.