If the first volume of J.K. Rowling’s saga announced a wholly imagined magical world with the innocent exhilaration of discovery, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets registers the series’ movement from charm into consequence. Rowling’s sophomore effort tightens the mechanics of her imagination while deepening the book’s moral and formal ambitions: it is at … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone performs a curious double task: it reanimates familiar strands of the British children’s-book tradition (the orphaned schoolboy, the boarding school adventure, the fairy-tale quest) while announcing, with surprising economy, the existence of a fully imagined parallel moral universe. Read as a discrete text rather than merely the … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time is at once a children’s novel, a piece of speculative philosophy, and a coming-of-age parable. First published in 1962, the book has endured because it refuses the condescension often levelled at “juvenile” literature: it addresses the emotional complexity of growing up and the metaphysical questions adults worry over, but … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
The New Renaissance Mindset 