And this is where the Harry Potter series stopped being aimed squarely at children. You can tell just by the size of it – it’s twice the size of Prisoner of Azkaban and three times the size of Philosopher’s Stone. This is probably my favourite book of the series behind Deathly Hallows (for reasons that will be explained later), it’s just so well written, so well thought out, so exciting and thrilling and so very, very mysterious. Taking the previous three parts into consideration (that you should always expect the unexpected, and the main villain often turns out to be someone you least expect, or not a villain at all) I had pretty much every new character in the book on my list of suspects as to who this main villain would turn out to be in the end. Everyone except Mad-Eye Moody – or at least, the person who looked like Mad-Eye – that was some twist.
The plot of the book was adapted heavily for the big screen, but unlike Prisoner of Azkaban, it didn’t work out for the better. The film adaptations started missing out massive elements of the stories, again, because the books became that much longer, we missed out on such details as the Weasley family destroying the Dursely’s front room as they tried to collect Harry via Floo Powder, the madness of Barty Crouch, Rita Skeeter being an unregistered Animagus, the monsters in the maze of the third task, how Barty Crouch Jr. escaped from Azkaban, S.P.E.W. and the House-elves, Dobby and Winky. Anyway, I shall stop complaining about the film adaptations now.
