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Tuesday, July 06, 1999 By Karen MacPherson, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
The magic of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" (Scholastic, $17.95) enchanted children and their parents over the past few months, landing the book on the best-seller lists -- a rare feat for a children's book.
Now, the sequel is out, and it looks like author J.K. Rowling has another mega-hit on her hands. While "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" (Scholastic, $17.95) fortunately lives up to expectations, it's just not enough to keep young readers busy for the entire summer.
Fortunately, the "Harry Potter" books are just the latest in a hallowed tradition of fantasy adventure books for children. Readers craving more books like "Harry Potter" have plenty to choose from, including the time-magic books of Edward Eager, which have been newly reissued by Harcourt Brace.
Let's start with the book we've all been waiting for, although many impatient people actually ordered the British version from amazon.com's United Kingdom affiliate because it was published months before the U.S. version.
As most young readers know, Harry is an orphan who lives with his mule-headed and stone-hearted aunt and uncle, Petunia and Vernon Dursley, and their nasty son, Dudley. The Dursleys have always treated Harry worse than dirt, but their contempt for him grows out of bounds when they learn he has magical powers.
Once he turned 12, Harry found that he is expected by the powers of magic to attend Hogwarts, the school where great wizards and witches are created. Harry also discovered that he is regarded with awe in the wizard world because Voldemort, the evil wizard who took his parents' lives, was unable to kill their baby son.
Readers of book one, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," know that he waged an intense and ultimately successful battle with Voldemort at the volume's end. It's clear, however, that we haven't heard the last of the evil wizard, an expectation played out in book two, "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets."
The book opens near the end of Harry's miserable summer "vacation" at the Dursleys. One night, he is visited by a strange, impish creature named Dobby, who begs him to stay away from Hogwarts if he wants to live.
Harry quickly learns that Dobby is right: Someone is trying to kill him, or at least maim him, even as other Hogwarts students are turned to stone.
As Hogwarts' staff struggles to keep its students protected from the evil flourishing in their midst, Harry and his friends Ron and Hermione decide to take action against it. After a series of adventures, coupled with the usual misadventures (Harry is human, despite his magical powers!), the three uncover the culprit, but not before Harry nearly loses his life.
Rowling's basic plot, as usual, is standard stuff for this genre. Also as usual, however, Rowling invests this routine scheme with such an inspired mixture of creativity and humor that the book stands far above many competitors.
Readers will thrill to the new magical touches in this book, from the car that can fly to plants whose cries are fatal to anyone who hears them.
Once again, however, the heart of the "Harry Potter" books -- and the reason they resonate so much with readers -- is Harry himself. In the first book, we mourned with him as he grieved again for his dead parents. In "Chamber of Secrets," we share his torment that he has been given powers normally associated only with evil wizards, including the power to talk to snakes.
Rowling provides the requisite happy ending after pulling Harry -- and the reader -- through some rough and frightening patches of darkness. Readers who loved the first "Harry Potter" won't be disappointed by this sequel. (Ages 8-adult)
Just in time to take advantage of the "Harry Potter" craze, the folks at Harcourt Brace have decided to reissue the works of Edward Eager, whose stories of quirky magic won critical and popular acclaim in the 1950s and have continued to win new readers ever since.
Magic is almost a living thing in Eager's books, where the child protagonists must decipher exactly what kind of powers they are being offered. This can lead to some hilarious consequences, as in Eager's first book, "Half Magic," where a girl named Jane picks up an odd coin on the sidewalk and wishes for some excitement in the form of a small fire that has lots of flames but no injuries.
A few minutes later, her wish is granted, as she and her siblings encounter a playhouse that has suddenly begun blazing. Eventually, Jane and the others learn that the coin grants them half a wish, and if they want to do it right, they must first do the math.
The same children star in "Magic by the Lake," and then, intriguingly, their own children star in two other Eager books, "Knight's Castle" and "The Time Garden." Eager loves to play with time in these books, bringing his characters into the past and sometimes even into the future.
Children particularly like Eager's books because they are witty and because they portray realistically drawn children having some marvelous adventures and also sometimes getting themselves into tight spots. There's squabbling here and sibling rivalry, but there's also the children's awe at the rare opportunity they have been given to experience a magical world.
These four books, which have retained the original drawings by N.M. Bodecker, have been spruced up with new cover illustrations by Quentin Blake. The books cost $17 each in hardcover and $6 each in paperback.
Eager's three other magic books -- "Magic Or Not?," "Seven-Day Magic" and "The Well-Wishers" -- will be available in hardcover and paperback in August. (Ages 8-12)
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