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Judging by this first volume, the Harry Potter books are a fine addition
to English children's fantasy literature. Harry Potter, orphaned when
his parents are killed by the evil wizard Voldemort, is taken in by
his aunt and uncle, who are Muggles (ordinary, non-magical people).
Harry is rather out of place there, but things improve greatly for
him when he goes to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry --
except that one of the staff is in league with Voldemort.

Part of the attraction of _Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone_
comes from the familiar but at the same time exotic setting of an English
public school, complete with houses and schoolboy adventures (in which
Harry and his friends Ron and Hermione struggle to save the world _and_
win the house cup). Part of it comes from the pleasantly frivolous
(verging on spoof) take on the trappings of pop magic (pointy hats and
"Nimbus 2000" series broomsticks). And Rowling adds some delightful
novelties of her own, such as Quidditch, a seven-a-side ball game played
on broomsticks, with three different kinds of balls. This is all pulled
together by some excellent story-telling.

I can't understand, however, why quite so much fuss has been made about
the Potter books. To highlight the limitations of _Harry Potter and
the Philosopher's Stone_, it is instructive to compare it with another
childrens fantasy novel in which a neophyte wizard attends a school for
wizards -- Ursula Le Guin's _A Wizard of Earthsea_. This works just as
well as a story, but it displays invention of a qualitatively different
order. Where Rowling reworks superficial popular ideas about magic in
an ad hoc fashion, Le Guin constructs a fully-fledged, but consistent
and coherent, world of her own: dragons in Earthsea, for example, are
both an integral part of the imagined world and anchored to mythological
precursors; for Rowling they are just a plot device appropriated from
common cliche. Le Guin cuts far deeper, too, in dealing with such
subjects as coming of age and accepting mortality, and her protagonist
is rounded in places where Harry Potter is no more than one-dimensional.

So _Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone_ will be a great Christmas
present for kids who haven't read it yet -- and it is a book that adults
(at least those without stunted imaginations) can read as well. But _A
Wizard of Earthsea_ is all of that and more, and children's fantasy is
a reasonably well-populated genre, so don't let the hype surrounding
the Harry Potter books hide the other goodies out there.