When last we left The Prisoner of Azkaban, Severus Snape had just crashed the party inside the Shrieking Shack. I was so excited to see what happened next that, when I had a few minutes before preaching at our Friday night service, I read some Harry Potter. Fortunately I’m not one of those Christians who thinks Harry Potter is evil or my sermon might have suffered tremendously.
I finished The Prisoner of Azkaban and enjoyed it. I liked how Voldemort wasn’t the main villain in this book but that we’re beginning to see sides taking shape. I really liked Sirius Black and I hope he shows up in the subsequent books.
Here are some of my thoughts on chapters 19-22 of The Prisoner of Azkaban.
Godfather
J.K. Rowling does a great job of writing truly despicable characters. I normally want to root for the bad guys but characters like Draco Mafloy and the Dursleys make that impossible. The Dursleys are especially despicable because they treat Harry, their own flesh and blood, so poorly. When Sirius Black said that he would care for Harry I was almost as excited as the boy wizard himself. Home needs to be a safe place where we are unconditionally loved and Harry would have had that with Sirius. Unfortunately it wasn’t meant to be but it appears that Harry will get to at least spend part of the summer with the Weasleys. I don’t have any children yet, but I know I want our home to be the safest, most loving place they can find. God created the family for that purpose and I want ours to fulfill it.
Time-Turner
Time travel is a classic sci-fi trope. If given the opportunity, who wouldn’t want to go back in time? I know it would be cool just go and observe the past (also to pick up Gray’s Sports Almanac). Harry and Hermione definitely make some changes but they use the Time-Turner for good. Time travel is so attractive because a lot of us wouldn’t mind making some changes in our past. We’ve all mad mistakes and bad choices that we wish we could take back. If we remove the mistakes and bad choices, though, we also remove the lessons we learned through those mistakes. Very often the lesson is more valuable than the mistake is painful.
Professor Lupin
I wonder if Rowling planned on the Professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts being a revolving door or if it just evolved into that. I really liked Lupin and was sad to see him go. Lupin was a great teacher but he was also a werewolf. Lupin understood that parents would never allow their children to be taught by what they perceived to be a dangerous monster. Unfortunately people made generalizations about Lupin without really getting to know him. It’s easy to do, though; I know that I do it all the time. It’s almost impossible not to pre-judge another person, even if the pre-judgments aren’t negative. We just need to make sure that our pre-judgments don’t keep us from seeing other people for who they are: handcrafted masterpieces formed by God.
I liked The Prisoner of Azkaban and, like I said earlier, hope that it laid the groundwork for the coming battle between good and evil. I’ve got some other fiction to read before I continue in the world of Harry Potter but I don’t think I can stay away for too long.
What were your insights from chapters 19-22 of The Prisonder of Azkaban?
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