When I read a book, I want to be consumed by the book, I want to learn something from it, and I want it to take me on a journey. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, is a book that I immediately loved when I first read it. The series as a whole is my favorite book series, but the first book really set off the journey and experience for me. As a third-grader reading the book for the first time, it really appealed to me because of how the characters experiences connected to the real world.
Right off the bat, the author introduces Harry, whose parents were killed when he was little. He is practically like an orphan since he doesn’t feel like he is part of his aunt and uncle’s family. Even though I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be like Harry, I could still learn something about what goes on outside of our little bubble of understanding. From this, I learned that people have real struggles and not all of us have the privilege of having loving families. As a little girl, this was the first time that I had ever been able to put myself in someone’s shoes like that. Given the fact, that there were other elements to why I loved the book, it was easier to force myself to try to understand the struggles of the characters.
On the other hand, there are also parts to the book where I feel like anybody could relate to the character. When Harry doesn’t know he is a wizard yet, he feels like an outsider and that he doesn’t belong. Only when he goes to Hogwarts, does he truly feel like he belongs. I know for a fact that everybody has felt like this sometime in their life, no matter the degree. Even when you transition to a new school, it may be hard at first to find a sense of belonging. Sometimes it even takes joining a club where there are people who have your same interests. In Addition, I think that Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone does a good job of showing conflicts that I think resemble the messed-up world we live in.
When the character Hermione Granger is introduced, she is introduced as a mudblood, which is somebody who is born with no wizarding relatives. Very early on in the book, other characters like Draco Malfoy take pleasure in taunting her with insults, calling her a mudblood. She is looked down on even though she happens to be the smartest one in the class. Even though the author is particularly problematic, I think she does a good job representing how certain groups of people are discriminated against in this world.
We see civil unrest all the time, and when I first read this book, those moments put a seed in my head of how maybe our world wasn’t perfect. Through my own experiences, I would never have been able to see the outside world in a different light.