The Sorcerer's Companion: A Guide to the Magical World of Harry Potter

My twelve-year-old daughter is a huge fan of Harry Potter, and selected this book herself. She really loves the pictures and found the information quite easy to understand. She loves this book and highly recommends it to you, and so do I!


Beautiful to look at ...   October 3, 2003
hmcni (Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful

This is a beautifully put together piece of work, with wonderful illustrations.

Unlike many of the guides to the Harry Potter universe, references are subtle and not scattered everywhere.

This book gives information about a lot of the supernatural/magical side of the Harry Potter books and goes into more detail than some other guides.

Nice and understated as far as the Harry Potter references go - this is a good and beautifully presented book for those interested in magic - whether that interest involves Harry Potter or not!


An interesting reference book for Potter fans   July 7, 2003
Daniel Jolley (Shelby, North Carolina USA)
23 out of 27 found this review helpful

While this book does offer a lot of good source material on subjects touched upon in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potters novels (one through four, at the time this book was written), it is by no means an indispensable addition to the Pottermaniac's personal library. The references to events and personages in the Harry Potter books are rather haphazard, and in many cases it is apparent that the Potter link is primarily a gimmick designed to sell more books. This is not necessarily a bad thing, though, because there is information in this book I had not encountered elsewhere, and it does reinforce one's impressive appraisal of the fiber of actual legendry that went into the creation of Rowling's novels.

This book offers a concise encyclopedia of magical subjects, creatures, and legends. Much of the material will be familiar to anyone well-read, yet there are aspects to some of even the most familiar of legends, such as that of the werewolf or vampire, that I was unaware of; this consisted for the most part of the different ideas held by different cultures. What was evil to a European of the Middle Ages was sometimes a portent of good to an inhabitant of China or India, for example. Perhaps the most interesting items discussed in these pages are the more obscure legends of unfamiliar beings which I had never heard of before and which I had assumed J.K. Rowling had invented: e.g., grundylows, kappas, and redcaps.

The authors, a professional magician and his academic daughter, have written a book that can easily be read by laymen in the ways of magic. The concise, far from elaborate discussions of each topic can be easily understood by young readers obsessed with Harry Potter, making it a welcome, interesting, entertainingly informative read that does not so much add to the legendry created by J.K. Rowling as it does highlight the sturdiness of the foundation upon which her magical adventure stories are built.