JK Rowlings – good author or overrated?

I read them all….book 7 actually the most.

Honestly…JK is overrated in both story and style. Yeah, the story is sweet, touching, and overall well structured because the beginning and ending were always there. But the fact that with possibly two other scenes through out all 7 books….we never are not behind Harry’s eyes. Our entire world view of HP is extremely limited being just his lone perspective. That reason alone, the fact we are never inside the mind of ANY other character, in my opinion is weak story telling and character development. To me it screams of limited talent and fear to really write beyond the mind of the one character. Having created a world filled with a wide variety of characters, it was massively odd to me that we never knew the story from anyone else’s pov.  All the other characters in the story are massively more impressive than Harry, but we never are in their heads. We never see anyone else on an adventure plot arc. We simply hear about their efforts. Was that fear again? Fear to stretch beyond the one character perspective?

And as far as Harry goes for a protagonist…she kinda created an overall loser. In every confrontation and challenge in the story, Harry either needs constant help to win anything, massive amounts of luck, and never once really out skill sets or defeats anyone until the final battle, and even then he spends the whole thing invisible and only defeats Voldemort on an educated guess that he truly owns the Elder Wand and the kill spell will rebound. Yeah, you can say he won with his mind and outsmarted Voldemort, but he merely used a single piece of information that only he knew, so in the end it wasn’t majorly impressive to me.

Let’s talk about setting. Book 7 aside again, for 6 stories we are locked into a single setting, minus the end of Book 5, and even then limited to a single building in London. Was JK afraid to write beyond Hogwarts? For such a wide world of wizarding, all we ever get is…Hogwarts for 80% of the franchise. Lack of skill in writing beyond that small setting? I dunno.

The characters growing up? In retrospect, years removed from having read the books, I don’t feel the characters were realistically aged well from children into young adults. I dunno, again. Hind sight makes me feel it was all less genuine than when I read them.

Now, I’m not a hardcore HP fan and was never remotely was a Potter Head, so I’ve never done outside research on JK or her writing style or methods. I’ve heard plenty of rumors, like after the first book it was ghost written by committee and she barely put her hands on the actual writing process. I’m not saying this is true, just reiterating the kinds of things I’ve heard. And frankly, part of me leans towards JK not really be totally a part of the full creative process, because if she were, I do not believe she would have allowed the massively unfaithful changes done in the movies. I mean, after a certain point, the movies are routinely unfaithful to the books in many many ways, and while I know movies can never be totally true to books, I find it appalling that any creator would allow their IP to be distorted so.

I mean…Deathly Hollows movie, especially the movie ending version, was a total bastardization compared to the book, which even though I criticized above in a few ways was at least well laid out and executed for its intended purpose as a final battle/confrontation.

Feel free to disagree with anything I’ve said, because I’m not HP expert. Just relying on my usually solid memory and perception skills.

If you go to the book section in charity shops here in the UK you will find many HP books on the shelves, those books have not stood the test of time

Like HP books Roald Dahl books at the time they where published where read by both the young and old and decades later they still are and its a IP that creators of art want to work with.

I can not see in two decades time HP books being still being read by the young and old and I cant see it being IP that people stll want to work with and I think that will be because of the quality of the writing rather than any age demography

I only read the first 4 books and watched all the movies. Personally, I enjoy the movies but can see the flaws in a lot of the characters. I think Rowlings isn’t as great as fans claimed and a lot of that was her being caught up in the hype of phenomena at the time. For me, a great writer is consistent in there style. Michael Crichton will always be one of my top authors. I’ve read some classics, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and those classic stories can really throw you off because of their styles being so different than what we’re used to seeing because of the various movie incarnations. Rowlings will always be known but nowhere near the caliber of so many other great writers; Rowlings is to the magic genre of books that Stephanie Meyers is to the vampire genre.

But…but…

Rowling has a great writing style with lots of wordplay and alliteration. Character creation too, she gives characters personalities and does not change them without a reason within the story. These things allow me to get over her shortcomings in world building and lack of rules in her magic system. So I would not call her overrated, but she needs to stop paying attention to social media and start writing again. I refuse to believe one series of books, however profitable, is enough for a creative writer.