Harry Potter anecdote

Ah, if you insist...


Well, back in 1997, I was 10. There was a book club at my school, a magazine order one. Being a vociferous reader, I would always get loads of books off it. At the end of Primary 6, my teacher gave me two books. They hadn't been published yet. What had happened was the publishers sent it to this club - Scholastic schools book club or something like that - who then sent copies to schools that bought X ammount of books to get one of the pupils to guinea pig them. Since I was buying the most books in my school, they gave me the 2 books to read, and tell them what I thought of them. I was part of the target audience. Cool.

So I did read them. Both of them. Then I gave my thoughts on them to the teacher who passed it on to the Book Club and so onwards...

The first book I enjoyed massively. It read very well, it was a real page turner, humerous too. I was convinced it would be great, and went to great lengths explaining why it was brilliant. That was Scribbleboy. You might not have heard of it now.

The other book though I wasn't fond of. I found it hard going, a bit too repititive and dry, and I gave up half way through it. My ten year old self told the teacher that this book really wasn't all that good, and that I didn't think many people would really enjoy it.

This was in April 1997.

The second book, as you may have guessed, was Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone. I still have my pre-release copy at my mums. And every time another Potter book came out, I always think back to my "review" of the original novel. And thankfully whoever was looking for my opinion on the book wasn't relying too heavily on it!