What readers think of Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix, plus links to write your own review.

It Was JK's Best, It Was Slow In The Begining But Very Fast Past By The End. I Highly Recamend This Book To Anyone Who Has Read The First Four.

she transfers us to a world full of magic and its a special and rare world because it makes us want to belong there to get away from here. rowling is magical and i hope harry never dies causes he's my idol!! you are the best joanne rowling!!

This book is the best but all of J.K. rowlings books are the best! I would have to say read this book it is wonderful and has surprises on each page.

it's a good read, tho i liked the previous books better. can't wait for the other 2.

It's a wonderful book! Worth to read!

I agree with Sarah, it was a bit of a clishe. 13 yrs.

I was not really sure about how to rate this one. The plot of the story was a bit boring, drab, and a little bit bland. I finished reading it with a little bit of dissapointment, because I had heard other reviews about this book that all said that it was very good. I do hope that Rowling's next book is better; this one was a bit of a clishe. !2 yrs.

After reading the first two Harry Potter books, I was, as so many others (please excuse the pun) enchanted by the offbeat and whimsical story. I couldn't wait to rip into the next one.
After the third book, I was forced to mildly raise an eyebrow over the Time Turner; a veritable Pandora's Box of plot absurdity. I shrugged it off and waited.
After reading "Goblet of Fire" I was a bit disappointed. Well, more than a bit disappointed. The story was rendered absolute garbage by an ending that made little (if any) sense. I didn't know quite what to make of this... I thought, "Well, I absolutely loved the first two books, tolerated the third and abhorred the fourth. I know that this is directly related to the quality of each individual book so that would indicate a trend. Namely, a downward trend. Yikes. Let's hope she can right the ship."
So I waited.
And waited.
And waited some more.
I finally managed to get a hold of the new Harry Potter book and found that the downward trend had blossomed into a full death spiral. Now, after the two previous books, I was pretty-much expecting Rowling to prominently incorporate some nutty gimick to move the plot along and, boy, I did not go home disappointed. Time travel, morphing worm hole and now mind control.

If I remember her comments about the problems with time travel correctly, this mind thingy probably made Davina throw her hands up in exasperation.

Shameless plot devices and logical inconsistencies aside, "Phoenix" was sub-par in every possible catagory. The pacing was herky-jerky, staggering and reeling between long-winded descriptions of the unimportant and sequences of rushed action like Ted Kennedy on St. Patty's Day. It went off on some very strange tangents and I haven't a clue as to what they were for. Granted, it might have served SOME purpose (perhaps some merchandising angle) but as far as I could tell, it certainly wasn't to forward this bi-polar tale.
What really ruined things for me was the direction Rowling decided to take with Harry's personality. Now I know that some may argue that this angst is a perfectly normal symptom of "Teenage-itis" and is, therefore, part of a realistic development but I would ask, "When is turning a three-dimensional character into a two-dimensional caricature of an adolescent a REALISTIC thing?" As I see things, you have good moods and you have bad moods. You laugh a bit. You cry a bit. You yell a bit. You... Well, you get the point. Anyway, becomming a teenager does make you angrier but certainly doesn't turn you into someone who forsakes all other modes of behavior. Unless, of course, it's accompanied by black depression and/or some very destructive behavior. I think this is a massive oversimplification of a complex, confusing time in life and given that many of her readers are themselves going through this stage, should have been treated with much, much more care.
Hmm.. Or perhaps the problem is perspective; that Rowling has forgotten what it was like to be that age. The way I figure it, the only people to whom it would appear that a teenager is ALWAYS angry is their parents. Maybe it's as simple as that?

This is getting way too long so I'll sum up: The quality of the stories are getting progressively worse, the plot devices are growing exponantially in their absurdity and the ploy of killing off inconsequential characters to manufacture drama was already used up in the fourth book. These facts combined with interviews that hint that the author feels "Phoenix" was her magnum opus and that she fancies herself a mixture of Roald Dahl and H.G. Wells leave me with a very bleak outlook on the furture of the Harry Potter franchise.