Rating: 
Summary: Superficial and tedious
Review: A thoroughly disappointing book. Lovers of the Harry Potter series will be irritated by the superficial attempt to list every possible analogy to names or occurances; teachers will be hard-pressed to find any useful material here as a forum for discussion. Much tedious research has gone into this book but the 'exploration' is more one of turning over the pebbles than of getting out a spade and actually digging.
This is to be the first of a series of 'Sourcebooks for Exploring Young Adult Fiction' with a commentary on the Narnia Chronicles set to follow. Hopefully the publishers will avoid trivializing and torturing further works as they have done here and treat young readers' minds with greater respect.
My advice is simple. Don't bother to read this. But to help you make up your own mind here is an excerpt."Harry can also be regarded as a medieval crusader, draped in symbolic robes in quest of the Holy Grail. As a Seeker, Harry battles heretics during games of Quidditch. His accident symbolizes a fall from grace before he can rise again as a worthy spiritual leader. Avoiding the fate of Lot's wife who turned into a pillar of salt when she looked back at Sodom, Harry leaves the Quidditch field with his face forward, avoiding glancing to either side. He also evades the basilisk's gaze."
Rating:
Summary: Superficial and tedious
Review: A thoroughly disappointing book. Lovers of the Harry Potter series will be irritated by the superficial attempt to list every possible analogy to names or occurances; teachers will be hard-pressed to find any useful material here as a forum for discussion. Much tedious research has gone into this book but the 'exploration' is more one of turning over the pebbles than of getting out a spade and actually digging.
This is to be the first of a series of 'Sourcebooks for Exploring Young Adult Fiction' with a commentary on the Narnia Chronicles set to follow. Hopefully the publishers will avoid trivializing and torturing further works as they have done here and treat young readers' minds with greater respect.
My advice is simple. Don't bother to read this. But to help you make up your own mind here is an excerpt. "Harry can also be regarded as a medieval crusader, draped in symbolic robes in quest of the Holy Grail. As a Seeker, Harry battles heretics during games of Quidditch. His accident symbolizes a fall from grace before he can rise again as a worthy spiritual leader. Avoiding the fate of Lot's wife who turned into a pillar of salt when she looked back at Sodom, Harry leaves the Quidditch field with his face forward, avoiding glancing to either side. He also evades the basilisk's gaze."
Rating: 
Summary: Sloppy
Review: I started this book and almost fell asleep. The author could have made this a bit more interesting! As I read through it, I noticed small things that arn't correct. First of all, when she was talking about Draco Malfoy's buddy Vincent Crabbe, she spelled 'Crabbe' wrong. She spelled it 'Crabb'. That is something that any TRUE Harry Potter fan would pick up automatically, since through out all of the books, Vincent Crabbe is known as Crabbe.This book is good, though, in helping kids, and adults, really think about what they are reading (i.e. the questions about each chapter in the books). I recommened this book to anyone who is not familiar to Harry Potter, but don't be disgruntled by one person's point of view!
Rating:
Summary: Utter Intellectual Trash
Review: Ick. I got this book a year ago or so as a gift and was pretty excited about it when I actually got it. It seemed to have all the right elements for a great gift. I'm a mythology geek who loves Harry Potter and well written companion guides to literature.
The entire book is so pretentiously written it was irritating and a lot of her correlations are total nonsense. Plus there were so many mistakes in her research that it lost all credibility. I find it hard to believe that anyone with a decent understanding in history, mythology, folklore and plain old Harry Potter could find this of much value. If they did, they'd see what poorly founded babble this is.
Rating:
Summary: Utter Intellectual Trash
Review: Ick. I got this book a year ago or so as a gift and was pretty excited about it when I actually got it. It seemed to have all the right elements for a great gift. I'm a mythology geek who loves Harry Potter and well written companion guides to literature.
The entire book is so pretentiously written it was irritating and a lot of her correlations are total nonsense. Plus there were so many mistakes in her research that it lost all credibility. I find it hard to believe that anyone with a decent understanding in history, mythology, folklore and plain old Harry Potter could find this of much value. If they did, they'd see what poorly founded babble this is.
Rating:
Summary: Awful!
Review: My husband picked this up, and I had him return it to the store the next day. My fear is that some parent or school administrator trying to make a decision about the Harry Potter books will read something like this instead of reading the books. My 7-year old son had better insights about symbolism, word origins, themes, etc. Plus, lots of creepy occult clipart illustrations with no apparent relation to either the Harry Potter stories or the text of this book itself. Just goes to show that anyone can make a buck off a hot property -- don't let it be at your expense.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Resource
Review: My mom bought this for me because she knows i'm a Harry Potter fanatic, it is very good at describing the settings and characters of Harry Potter in an easy to follow format. This book has easy enough to read words for kids, I had no trouble reading this (i'm fifteen) Good Book.
Rating:
Summary: Ripping off the readers.
Review: This book was obviously poorly reseached and written with many errors. It was filled with wild generalizations that seemed more like the effort of a student who hadn't studied for a test to convince the teacher by sheer volume of writing that they must have something right in there somewhere. The entire book was full of guesswork and assumptions which were not supported by solid research and information. The style was not very readable, more like reading a student's research paper than a book and both my children and myself found most of the activity suggestions to be of the sort usuallly found in textbooks; guaranteed to make all but the most avid fan bored or disgusted with the whole series. We have found several books which actually do what this one promised. They use research to make the connections to the actual source mythology, latin words used in the spells, puzzles, word plays, etc. and although not perfect, are certainly much more worthwhile and readable than this one. One of the better ones is The Sorcerer's Companion: A Guide to the Magical World of Harry Potter by Allan Zola Kronzek and Elizabeth Kronzek
Rating:
Summary: congratulations!
Review: This is one of the worst books I've ever read! The style is clunky and awkward; it even has errors in grammar... As to substance, it has none. It is very vague and general. Very superficial presentations of classical mythology, ancient and modern history, science, and everything else you can think of are thrown in, although these topics have no relation to HP. Comparisons are farfetched and strained--not to mention strange. Harry and his friends are compared to British children who were evacuated from London to rural areas during World War II. Why does the author do this? Your guess is as good as mine. Don't buy this book. Save your money and buy a good reference book on classical mythology.
Rating:
Summary: Worst of a really bad subgenre
Review: This is the worst of a flurry of milk-the-Harry-Potter-craze books, surpassing the pathetic JK Rowling biography and the abysmal "We Love Harry Potter!" book. Padded with pseudo-intellectualism, every strained comparison and mythical nuance, it drones on for about 500 pages on topics that have very little to do with Harry Potter. If you don't take it seriously, it has a certain comedy value--because it DOES take itself seriously. Riddikulusly so. The uneasy feeling began when I read "NOT approved by JK Rowling" on the cover, and was compounded when I read the introduction: "Harry represents an archetypal hero who would have been as familiar to ancient Greeks as he is to modern suburbanites." (And I may be mistaken, but I thought the plural of kibbutz was kibbutzim. Editor, please?) It immediately launched into stuff about Harry Potter merchandise, fans, newspaper and movies. It also, rather sneeringly, goes over the people with concerns about Harry Potter comments, as well as lumping them all into "conservative Christian" category (which is inaccurate, as I've met Jews, Muslims, atheists who were anti-HP) and apparently dismissing their concerns. The book is tiresome for a long while, engaging in media name-dropping and burbling about the various prestigious shows that JKR has been on and all the awards the books have won. The author also feels it necessary to go over the various words that might be too tough for the uneducated masses ( "foreshadowing"; "Beatles"; "anomaly"; "Rolls Royce"...) Oh, and there are spiky, unattractive pictures scattered through the book. After about forty pages of such drivel, we finally get to the actual content on the books and characters. Unfortunately, the book is so bogged down by pseudo-intellectualism and the obsession with symbolism that any coherency (not to mention rationality) is rapidly lost. After a few pages of actually talking normally, the author felt it necessary to start off by explaining the significance of the names. Though some undoubtedly have meaning ("Lupin," for one) they then degenerate into talking about how Hedwig inspires Harry, and theorizing that Crookshanks, rather than just being a bow-legged cat, is named after the fantasy illustrator George Cruikshanks. We are also given material that will put any 9-12 student to sleep, as well as many adults. The book cheerfully gives us a geography lesson on the UK, and a long listing of seeming irrelevent Greek mythology. Then King Arthur, then fairy tales. These send the author into a new spin of babbling: "Only the arrival of the Dementors [...] rouses him from his unconscious stupor, but ironically the Dementors' Kiss, an act in the normal world that represents warmth, causes the complete absence of a person's conscience as in the Kiss of Judas." Other examples of pathetically strained thinking are: the connecting of Dudley's name with Dudlachd, the winter months of Scotland; the connecting of Celtic holidays with Hogwarts' Halloween party; respect of elders is equated with ancestor worship (WHAT?); Harry's infant swaddling of blankets is compared to Moses's basket (it stops just short of saying "Harry is Christ!"); and claiming that Dumbledore is similar to Merlin (somehow he strikes me as a watered-down Gandalf...). I hate to offend anyone, but frankly NO BOOK ON EARTH has this much symbolism and interwoven meaning in it. Not even Lord of the Rings. The fact that the book was not approved by JK Rowling indicates that her thoughts and intents were never consulted. This person is simply loading what would be a slim volume with pseudo-intellectualism and a lot of babble, drawing from every source with even an imaginary connection to HP. (I can't imagine that when Rowling wrote of baby Harry in a bunch of blankets, she was thinking of Moses) I give it one star for being entertaining. It's so ridiculously earnest that it comes across as comedic. It's silly, overworked and overburdened with information that does not have anything to do with its sources. So, read it for the comedic value and a good laugh or two. As a genuine work of "exploration," it's a dismal flop.
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