Monday, July 29, 2024

The Crown Jewels, Part 3

 I've always been particularly partial to this book. Back in the late nineties, when I first started reading Harry Potter, I felt that they were pretty good, but mostly typical of children's literature. They felt like they had a lot in common with books by Roald Dahl, for example, and I wasn't too overly blown away. Then, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban came out, and it felt like the series took a humongous leap forward.

With this book, Rowling started expanding the stories. They were much more complex and interwoven.

The books jumped from nice books that people would enjoy into one of the best series that had every been written for kids, and good enough to excite adults as well.

I felt like the movies went that way as well. Christopher Columbus directed the first two films, and they were kind of pedestrian, but at the third movie, things suddenly sped up and got more interesting.

However, with that jump forward in complexity came a longer page count. This book was the first of those that was longer.

This book is only about seventy pages longer than the last one, but, although I haven't counted, I'm pretty sure it has about the same number of illustrations in the book.

Nevertheless, each illustration is just as impressive as the ones in the last two books.

The pictures are great, and it is hard to read the book without simply spending your time leafing through the pages to look at all the pictures.

So, I guess that this book is not like the original book or the movie.

It isn't a vast step forward in the series.

However, it was great, top of the line, cream of the crop, from the very beginning.

So, it didn't need to jump forward.

 It just kept up the tradition of excellence.

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