The Tales Of Beedle the Bard by J. K. Rowling

These 5 tales are all constructed to sound similar to traditional fairytales with the twist of being told by wizards, but I found that most fell flat for me. "The Fountain of Fair Fortune" and "The Warlock's Hairy Heart" were alright, although bland. The rest felt like a waste of time (luckily they feature extremely basic writing and are very quick to read.)

Rowling has never had a way with words, but this was abysmal. The writing was choppy and stilted, with a tiny vocabulary (even for kid's stories) except where a thesaurus seems to have been used to stick in more interesting words that stick out like a sore thumb in Rowling's weak sentence structure. This book looks bigger than it is because of the large, double-spaced font with HUGE margins. If you put it into a normal-ish format this would barely qualify as more than a pamphlet. Dumbledore's notes were obvious and uninteresting, with feeble attempts at wittiness that just made me wince.

Harry Potter diehards will probably find the scant few hints about the Wizarding World worth the quick stories, but casual fans will probably want to skip.

1 Star
 
Emme