A NOTE ON THE SPOILERS
A while ago I got a comment tantrum from a semiliterate rando because apparently some people are too stupid to understand a SPOILER WARNING, so I thought I’d elaborate on my exact definition of a spoiler. I AM GOING TO SUMMARIZE THE ENTIRE BOOK, INCLUDING THE ENDING. Think of me as a very niche Wikipedia. If you have a problem with that, you are welcome to stop reading at any time. I don’t make money from this content. I don’t care how many people read it.
This is your legacy, Fedup: an extra line on an obscure book blog that probably doesn’t even have ten followers. It’s not exactly a Nobel prize, but it’s still quite a nifty little achievement. Your parents must be so proud. Please seek help.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
J.K. Rowling
NOTE 1: J.K. Rowling is a virulently hateful person, and she has made that inescapably clear over the last several years. This review series is solely about my thoughts on the Harry Potter books and will not go into her unapologetic transphobia, though I will make a note of it if and when it pops up in the books. Nevertheless, it would’ve been strange to embark upon a Harry Potter review without mentioning the author herself.
NOTE 2: I’m assuming you’re going to be able to follow the names and vocabulary. Google it if you can’t. There’s way too much background detail for me to explain in one review, or even seven.
NOTE 3: Thanks to my British-authored crossword app, I have learned that “prang” is British slang for a traffic accident, and that is HILARIOUS. I now love Ernie Prang even more than I already did.
You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers for pretty much the entire series. Other reviews in this series can be found here. Increasingly feral Kindle notes are saved here.
“HE DIDN’T DISAPPARATE!” Snape roared, now very close at hand. “YOU CAN’T APPARATE OR DISAPPARATE INSIDE THIS CASTLE! THIS – HAS – SOMETHING – TO – DO – WITH – POTTER!”
“Severus – be reasonable – Harry has been locked up –”
BAM.
The door of the hospital wing burst open.
Fudge, Snape, and Dumbledore came striding into the ward. Dumbledore alone looked calm. Indeed, he looked as though he was quite enjoying himself. Fudge appeared angry. But Snape was beside himself.
“OUT WITH IT, POTTER!” he bellowed. “WHAT DID YOU DO?”
Okay, look: I know everybody likes to latch onto “Always” as Snape’s most iconic moment, but this one scene, where he rolls up on Harry and Hermione almost literally breathing fire while they are in the hospital wing, has been my favorite since childhood and I really don’t know why. It’s been decades since I first read Azkaban, but “OUT WITH IT, POTTER!” still makes me laugh way too hard.
Anyway, yep, that’s Snape. He was just having the WORST day. You’re probably wondering how he ended up in this situation, and to be perfectly frank he is too, though he does have a solid theory based on three years’ worth of bitter observation. To understand how we got here, we have to go back in time a bit to Snape’s own school days, when he was a sneaky greasy kid who absolutely hated (and was hated by) the self-titled Marauders, a quartet of Gryffindor boys: James Potter, Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, and Peter Pettigrew. (Snape of course was a Slytherin, which certainly didn’t help matters, though I consider Pettigrew to be Slytherin-adjacent.) James and Sirius were two of the most popular kids in the school, owing to their combined talent and charisma, and they got a lot of their kicks by relentlessly bullying Snape, which most of the student body eagerly supported. Their collective relationship with Snape was similar to the present-day relationship between Harry and Draco Malfoy, though with a far nastier edge.
This isn’t to say that the Marauders were completely shallow: Remus was bitten by a werewolf as a child and was only allowed into Hogwarts by chance, when Dumbledore took over as headmaster. To accommodate Remus without endangering his classmates, a house was built in the nearby village of Hogsmeade, and he was taken there once a month to hide his transformations. The house – later called the Shrieking Shack – was connected to school grounds by a tunnel, over which was planted the Whomping Willow, which theoretically should have been a powerful deterrent, as anyone who has read Chamber of Secrets will know. Though Remus took great pains to hide his condition, however, his friends eventually put two and two together. Rather than abandoning him, James and Sirius – and, by extension, Peter (nowhere near their league in terms of talent or brains but still along for the ride) – became Animagi, granting themselves the ability to turn into animals at will. James and Sirius took the forms of a stag and a shaggy black dog, respectively, while Peter became a rat for reasons that became plainer as they grew older. In their animal forms, they were able to keep Remus company without danger to themselves, and they were also able to keep him in check when they started roaming the full-moon nights. Despite a handful of near misses, they explored much of the local area during their adventures, and over time created the Marauder’s Map, an enchanted map that charts every inch of the Hogwarts castle and grounds. Though this map was later confiscated by Filch, who never knew exactly what it was but knew quite well that it was up to no good, it eventually ended up in the hands of James’s son, naturally when he was about to break school rules.
Of course, Snape also noticed that Remus disappeared once a month and was mad to find out why, and thought he’d finally gotten a breakthrough when Sirius told him how to get past the Whomping Willow. Sirius fully intended to let Snape run into the transformed Remus, but James learned what he’d done just in time to pull Snape back. Unfortunately, Snape had already seen Remus in his altered state, and he was sworn to secrecy by Dumbledore; but from that moment he swore a vendetta against all Marauders, including Remus, who didn’t actually have anything to do with Sirius’s prank. As for the Marauders, they were shattered five years later: James was murdered by Voldemort following a seeming betrayal by Sirius, who was then taken to the infamous wizard prison of Azkaban after a streetful of witnesses saw him blow Peter to smithereens. Fast-forward to the present day, when Harry and his friends board the Hogwarts Express after an eventful summer that included the more-or-less accidental inflation of Harry’s disgusting Aunt Marge, and find Remus – now called Professor Lupin, age thirty-three and very shabby – fast asleep in the only empty compartment.
At this point in time and space, Harry has blown up Aunt Marge after he got sick of her verbal abuse, run away from home, gotten spooked by a giant black dog that just appeared out of nowhere, almost gotten himself run over by the Knight Bus – a sort of wizarding taxi service – immediately after seeing said dog, and spent the remainder of the summer at the Leaky Cauldron in Diagon Alley. He fully expected to be expelled from Hogwarts after blowing up Aunt Marge but was received with astonishing mildness by Cornelius Fudge, the Minister of Magic, who chose not to make a fuss even though Harry definitely got an official warning last summer after Dobby performed a Hover Charm in the Dursleys’ kitchen. To cap off a summer that could reasonably be called both the best and the worst of his short life, he managed to coordinate with Ron and Hermione in the final couple of days; however, they immediately got into a fight when Hermione was unexpectedly chosen by the wizarding cat distribution system, which in itself might not have been a problem if her new cat Crookshanks weren’t hell-bent on snaffling Scabbers, Ron’s pet rat. Worst of all (from Harry’s point of view), Uncle Vernon did not sign the permission form that was enclosed with this year’s supply list, meaning that Harry – though eligible by age – will not be allowed to visit Hogsmeade with his friends. Just because matters weren’t complicated enough already, Harry also learns that Sirius has escaped from Azkaban and is assumed to be out to get him.
This is a major problem: Sirius’s presumed intentions are bad enough on their own, but the Ministry, fuming over its inability to keep him contained and terrified over the potential loss of Harry, the biggest anti-Voldemort mascot in the world, stations a small army of Azkaban guards around the school. Thus, Harry comes face to face with a Dementor, a depression-inducing reaper-like creature, for the first time in his life when the Hogwarts Express is searched right before arriving at the school. The mere presence of the Dementor throws Harry back into long-forgotten memories of his parents’ final moments, the stress of which causes him to collapse every time the Dementors get near. It doesn’t help that Harry, Ron, and Hermione start studying Divination under the neurotic Professor Trelawney, who repeatedly predicts Harry’s death with glee, and, though he mostly ignores her, he can’t help noticing that the same black dog that almost got him run over keeps hanging around campus. Again, the dog wouldn’t be an issue if Professor Trelawney hadn’t planted the idea that Harry is being stalked by the Grim, a dog-shaped omen of death; but, since she did, Harry becomes increasingly convinced that the dog is the Grim. After a near-fatal Quidditch accident that ends with the total destruction of his prized Nimbus Two Thousand, caused by a surprise sighting of the dog and about a hundred hungry Dementors, a fed-up Harry schedules anti-Dementor lessons with Professor Lupin. These prove to be difficult, but Lupin manages to teach him the basics of the Dementor-repelling Patronus Charm in relatively short order.
Meanwhile – because it wouldn’t be a Harry Potter book if Hagrid weren’t causing some kind of trouble – Hagrid becomes the new Care of Magical Creatures teacher after former Professor Kettleburn resigns, but his first lesson is sabotaged by Malfoy, who is stupid enough to get himself attacked by an angry hippogriff. Though his injuries are not serious enough to warrant extended hospital time, his father pushes the Ministry to execute Buckbeak. Harry and his friends vow to help Hagrid appeal the sentence, but all of the work quickly falls on Hermione, even though her academic schedule requires her to be in multiple classes at once: Harry is kept busy by his Quidditch practice schedule and his Patronus classes and barely has time to do his own homework, and Ron just forgets. Additionally, Crookshanks remains determined to abduct Scabbers and Hermione sets herself at odds with the boys when she reports the Firebolt broomstick Harry received from an anonymous sender for Christmas, and all in all they don’t talk to her much throughout the year, though Hagrid takes them to task for their treatment of her. (On the bright side, Harry’s Patronus lessons produce stunning results, as he proves when he shoots down Malfoy, believing him to be a Dementor.)
Long story short, it’s a roller coaster of a year, as Harry struggles to balance school, friends, Quidditch, impending doom, Patronus lessons, the threat of Sirius, and his overwhelming need to just be a normal teenager who isn’t under constant threat. Of course, fate is rarely obliging, and the Sirius problem boils over into a violent confrontation when Sirius abducts Ron (like any innocent man would) and takes him to the Shrieking Shack, where Harry, Hermione, and Lupin catch up with him. After a long chain of misunderstandings, Sirius finally explains that he is in fact after Scabbers, an alias Peter Pettigrew took on after he betrayed Lily and James to Voldemort. He then framed Sirius for selling out the Potters and faked his own murder, and got himself adopted by the unsuspecting Weasley family in order to keep a paw on the pulse of the wizarding world. This of course was not the original plan, but Voldemort did get himself obliterated by the one-year-old Harry, so needs must. Sirius has now been stalking Pettigrew for a year with substantial help from Crookshanks, who knew Scabbers to be untrustworthy, but has been thwarted every time. With Pettigrew now in his clutches – and despite an untimely interruption from the still-bitter Snape, who almost ruins everything – Sirius nearly carries out the crime for which he was imprisoned, but Harry intervenes at the last minute, convincing Sirius and Lupin to send Pettigrew to Azkaban instead.
With his freedom all but assured, Sirius tells Harry that he is his godfather, and invites him to live with him. Harry accepts immediately, but his dreams of a Dursley-free life go up in smoke when Lupin transforms under the light of the full moon. During the ensuing fight, Pettigrew escapes and the kids per usual end up in the hospital wing after they are almost killed by a swarm of Dementors, while Snape captures Sirius and hands him straight to the Ministry. Sirius is supposed to have his soul completely sucked out by a Dementor in a process known as the Dementor’s Kiss, but Dumbledore believes in his innocence and arranges for Harry and Hermione to travel back three hours using a Time Turner, the magical time-traveling device that has been getting Hermione to her classes all year. With this extra gift of time, they rescue Buckbeak before the Ministry can execute him, then send both him and Sirius into hiding; and Harry produces his second-ever corporeal Patronus, a silver stag that mows down the Dementors who put the kids in the hospital in the first place. This brings us right up to the present, in which Snape learns that Sirius has escaped “justice” and goes completely insane. Left with nothing and with no way of bringing back his five seconds of Sirius-catching glory, Snape tells the whole school that Lupin is a werewolf, effectively forcing his resignation.
This seems like the end for Sirius and Harry, but Harry receives a letter from Sirius on the train home. In this letter, Sirius reveals that he is the source of the Firebolt, and encloses a signed note – as Harry’s unofficial guardian – granting him permission to visit Hogsmeade. He also gifts the delivery owl to Ron as compensation for the loss of his rat. Ron has spent the last couple of books pining for an owl, but still makes sure to check the owl’s trustworthiness with Crookshanks before he gleefully accepts. Upon arriving in King’s Cross, Harry cheerfully informs Uncle Vernon that he has met his godfather and that said godfather is a convicted murderer, and makes his way home in anticipation of a much better summer than the last one. (And, oh, yes: Hermione finally drops two classes and returns the Time Turner to Professor McGonagall, bringing her academic schedule back to normal.)
My first and most obvious thought is that Hermione should not have been allowed to take every class she wanted, simply because she happens to be a model student. Given the dangers presented by unregulated time travel, I would have thought that keeping the Time Turners out of the hands of children would have been rule one, no matter how advanced those children happen to be. More than that, though, the teachers and/or the headmaster should have stepped in before she was allowed to drive herself to the point of nuclear collapse. It’s great that she wants to learn all the things, but there should’ve been some guardrails in place. At the very least, I would’ve expected McGonagall to sit down with her and walk her through each subject and make her pick and choose instead of just letting her sign up for everything and then handing her a Time Turner to make her wishes physically possible. What on earth are the teachers for if they’re not there to guide the students? Is there no such thing as academic counseling? (If I start dissecting the actual logic of the Time Turner it’s going to give me a headache, so I’m not going to try.)
On the subject of the teachers: Dumbledore’s track record for hiring shockingly unprofessional teachers remains untarnished with the introduction of Professor Sybill Trelawney, great-great-granddaughter of famed Seer Cassandra Trelawney (omg I just caught the reference to Greek mythology NICE), who lacks the scale of her great-great-grandmother’s gifts but still possesses some level of clairvoyance. Her smaller predictions seem to come true fairly regularly, but she will also occasionally go into a trance – of which she will later remember nothing – and make a serious prophecy, as she does at the end of Harry’s final exam. I’m fine with all of that, but, as with a number of other so-called “professional” wizards, I really can’t stand her personal habits. Snape should not be allowed to terrorize students to the point that he is Neville Longbottom’s greatest fear even though Neville’s parents were literally tortured to insanity by rabid Voldemort supporters MY GOD WHY IS THIS MAN STILL TEACHING; Filch should not be allowed to threaten students with medieval torture; Lockhart should not be allowed to make his (fictional) exploits into the entire DADA curriculum; Hagrid should not be allowed to force students to take care of his stupid personal projects, which he will do in the next book, and he should not have been allowed to make the kids buy a biting book they won’t even use, just because he thought it was funny; and Trelawney should not be allowed to predict the deaths of her students for no other reason than spooky vibes.
I’m sorry, but I am very offended by this particular quirk, especially as McGonagall – one of the actual professionals – flat out tells Harry’s class that Trelawney loves to introduce herself to new students by predicting the death of one of their number. The fact that none of these people has died yet means absolutely nothing, because she keeps doing it and she manages to weave it into every interaction with her chosen unfortunate. If she were genuinely trying to warn people, that would be one thing. But she does it solely for the drama and the lulz, and that makes me absolutely crazy. It’s not that every Hogwarts professor is an unhinged nutcase – I would trust Professors McGonagall, Sprout, and Flitwick with my life, and Professor Binns is so unobjectionable that I normally forget he exists – but the objectionable professors are so prominent that they drown out the normal ones. And here again, it is reasonable to assume that Dumbledore is aware of their behavior, but he chooses not to interfere with it for reasons that are beyond me.
My next thought: I understand that they are teenagers and things like pet rats and brand-new broomsticks seem like they hold the fate of the world, but I really hate how Ron and Harry treat Hermione in this book. I completely agree with Hagrid: I would’ve thought that the pair of them would value their friend more than a rat or a broomstick. Even when Harry tries to make nice after a couple of months of ostracization, it’s only because he got the Firebolt back, and his idea of making nice does not include an actual apology for ruthlessly abandoning Hermione at a time when she needed a good friend. Now, in total fairness, Ron does have a legitimate grievance: Hermione is remarkably careless with Crookshanks’s whereabouts, and never seems to take his anti-Scabbers campaign seriously. On the other hand, Crookshanks is a cat, and a semi-outdoor cat at that, and I do not expect her to keep tabs on him every minute of every day. But it still wouldn’t have killed her to make more of an effort to keep him away from Scabbers, though I do have to admit that it would’ve saved a lot of trouble down the road and a lot of people would still be alive if Crookshanks had been allowed to eat Scabbers.
One final note before I wrap up this post that has spun completely out of my control and is probably at least two rolls of parchment more than what Professor Binns asked for: I did not have “Hate Oliver Wood” on my Harry Potter bingo card, but he is so unignorably obnoxious that I’m glad this book marks his final appearance. (He does briefly appear at the beginning of Goblet of Fire, but we won’t count that.) He’s almost like a watered-down Cormac McLaggen at this point, though I will say that McLaggen is objectively much worse and I’m not sorry Hermione confunds him while he’s flying. Wood’s behavior is driven by his all-consuming desire for the Quidditch Cup, which he has never won, and ordinarily I would accept that as an excuse if the drive for the Cup didn’t define his behavior in the last two books as well. I don’t remember being this annoyed by him in the past, but during this read it was hard to miss him as he delivered Quidditch lectures that made Harry late for class, badgered Harry about the need to score a certain amount of points in the season finale (in which, it must be noted, Gryffindor did finally win the Cup), and made it clear that he didn’t care if Harry broke his neck so long as he won them the game first. This is the downside of Gryffindor kids, who are supposed to be brave but are also frequently arrogant, selfish, and foolhardy. I suppose it was nice of him to give us such a clear demonstration.
Per usual, it was the beautiful wizarding lifestyle vibes that saved the book; to this day, my favorite time of Harry’s life remains the two glorious weeks he spends at total liberty in the Leaky Cauldron, exploring Diagon Alley by day and finishing all his summer homework at Florean Fortescue’s Ice Cream Parlor. I still want to go on a shopping spree in Diagon Alley, and we can now add Hogsmeade to the list of wants as well, though I couldn’t say why the kids need parental permission to visit a wizarding village when they are allowed to play murderball completely unchecked. Bonus points: Azkaban introduces my very favorite character, Sir Cadogan (YES REALLY DON’T JUDGE ME), though I think Crookshanks might have just edged him out of the top spot; and I’ve always liked Lupin and Sirius. The eventual loss of the Firebolt is already giving me angry fits, even if we’re nowhere near Deathly Hallows.
Unfortunately, Azkaban also marks the point in the series where holes start to appear in the fabric of the wizarding world, and it is the point where Rowling’s writing starts to go downhill as she for some reason begins to rely on all-caps dialogue, repeated adverbs, and sloppy prose that sometimes reads more like a placeholder that was supposed to eventually be rewritten. On page one, for instance, we are treated to this absolute gem:
Harry Potter was a highly unusual boy in many ways.
lol. That’s your opening bid? Sorry to anyone who thinks Rowling is a brilliant writer but right here she sounds like she’s about to embark upon a book report, I mean, tell me you hate writing intros without telling me you hate writing intros. The entire first chapter reads like a high school essay, as Rowling continues to repeat and reinforce her thesis statement: “Yet another unusual thing about Harry was” … “Of all the unusual things about Harry” … “Extremely unusual though he was.”
For what it’s worth, the writing in Azkaban is mostly okay; if anything, the decline in quality is far sharper in Goblet of Fire. There’s been at least one major change to the text at the end, which is puzzling because it seems entirely unnecessary. Was this a Rowling addition, or was it added by later editors? But also I’m annoyed, because if we’re going back through these things and re-editing them – which also happened with Chamber of Secrets, in which Lockhart’s use of the word “harelip” was replaced with something inoffensive – then for the love of Merlin why can’t we take out some of the adverbs that Rowling just loves to repeat page over page over page? (“Quietly” seems to be her favorite, as proven during a torturously written Pensieve scene in Half-Blood Prince.) If we’re talking about rewrites, why can’t we take out some of the damn ellipses and make her actually finish a sentence for once?
And yet there is something about this book that I absolutely love, as evinced by my final rating, and I’m not mad. The latter half of the series isn’t great for a variety of reasons, so it may simply be that, as with the last two books, I am enjoying the gentler ride before the world begins to darken (or before the prose gets worse – take your pick). Whatever the reason, Prisoner of Azkaban was a surprisingly agreeable ride – it’s been so long that I had somewhat forgotten how much I love this book – and it’s made me more optimistic about the next book, which took me the better part of two months the last time I tried to reread it. Here’s hoping that I don’t get hit by the Harry Potter doldrums halfway through the Triwizard Tournament.
