I am having a bit of a love/hate relationship with the details in this book. I love the ones that are there: I enjoy the way Rowling writes and think it is very easy to visualize the scene from her details. However, thinking from the fact that I have not read the first three books in quite a few years and some people have never read them, I think this book severely lacks details about Hogwarts.
The Sorting Hat is introduced in Chapter 12 (pages 176 and 177 for its song). It is a bit long so I won't copy it all, but that is the focus of my notable moment. In the first book, Rowling describes the castle, its history, all of its little quirks like the missing stairs and the doors as paintings. In this book, all you have is the Sorting Hat song. It goes into very little detail about the four founders of Hogwarts, something I personally loved reading about (I'm a history major so no suprise there). And everything else is just assumed. We now have the movies to go off of for hints from past books, but when you ignore the movies you have no idea what the castle looks like, how its set up, the celing in the Great Hall, everything basically. The book would of course be an extra 200 pages if she added all this in again, but I think not having it takes away from the experience. I really want to go back and read book one again to reintroduce myself to the wizarding world and Hogwarts. The point: details matter. And so does reading the books in order.
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