Something About Harry.(Book Review)

Everyone hates hype, but it was mighty hard to get mad at the hoopla surrounding the June 21 publication of J. K. Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" (870 pages. Scholastic). OK, there's always going to be a certain level of grumbling when a phenom's this gigantic--one online columnist opined that the Potter books, because they are also popular with adults, only contribute to an increasing "infantilization" of culture. But let's not complicate matters unnecessarily: when any book, especially a novel written primarily for children, outsells the latest blockbuster movie--it sold 9 million copies worldwide the first weekend and made more than the U.S. debut of "The Hulk"--it's a sweet moment, pure and simple.

Even behavior that under almost any other circumstances would look, well, crazy--here it just looks eccentric, if not downright charming. In the United States and the United Kingdom, thousands of people turned up at bookstores on Friday night, June 20, waiting for midnight, when "Phoenix" would finally go on sale. In New York's Times Square, people lined up around the block at Toys "R" Us to get a copy. But the luckiest book buyers of all were the customers in a Waterstone's in Edinburgh, where Rowling herself showed up to sign books.

Is Harry's latest installment worth all the hype? In a word: absolutely. Rowling's first four books came out one right after another with hardly a year apart. By the time the fourth book appeared, the strain of the pace was beginning to show. "Goblet of Fire" was compulsively readable, like a 734-page action sequence, but the writing was much sloppier than the prose in the earlier installments. "Order of the Phoenix," in contrast, never goes out of control. The story is atmospheric, full of detail and told with a natural storyteller's gift for pacing and surprise.

Yes, a major character dies this time, and it's disturbing because you liked this character (unlike Cedric Diggory in the last book, whose ...