A Review of 'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince' by J.K. Rowling (audiobook)

"The war against Voldemort is not going well: even Muggle governments are noticing.  Ron scans the obituary pages of 'The Daily Prophet' looking for familiar names.  Dumbledore is absent from Hogwarts for long stretches of time, and the Order of the Phoenix has already suffered losses.  And yet...

As in all wars, life goes on.  Sixth-year students learn to Apparate, and lose a few eyebrows in the process.  The Weasley twins expand their business.  Teenagers flirt and fight and fall in love.  Classes are never straightforward, though Harry receives some extraordinary help from the mysterious Half-Blood Prince.

So it's the home front that takes center stage on the multilayered sixth installment of the story of Harry Potter.  Harry struggles to uncover the identity of the Half-Blood Prince, the past owner of a potions textbook he now possesses that is filled with ingenious, potentially deadly spells.  But Harry's life is suddenly changed forever when someone close to him is heinously murdered right before his eyes.

With Dumbledore's guidance, he seeks out the full, complex story of the boy who became Lord Voldemort, and thereby attempts to find what may be his only vulnerability."

I just love how especially towards the end of the series, J.K. Rowling changes everything.  The best part of this book by far is learning more about Voldemort.  I appreciate this because it gives humanity to the bad guy.  Instead of just fighting him because of the things he did (which of course doesn't change things), Harry and Dumbledore dig into his past.  Their goal wasn't really to figure out what happened to him, they were researching what objects or things could be his Horcruxes.  But you can't have one without the other.  We learn just how effed up of a past and of a family young Tom Riddle he had and how little control he had over his own story.  Maybe in better circumstances he could have turned things around and could have led a positive happy life in an effort to spite his family who cared so little for him... but in actuality, Tom didn't have anyone to care about him.  The orphanage didn't give a crap about him.  I'm not sure what Tom had in the way of friends or friends-as-family when he got to Hogwarts... he had no one because no one showed him he could be better than his violent tendencies.  In a way, J.K. Rowling gave us the reasons and background on just why Voldemort became the Voldemort we are so familiar with.

I don't think there is any way that the series could have ended differently or that Voldemort could have changed.  But there's a person behind all of this madness and the world wronged him from his first day of life.

This was my biggest take-away from the story.  Interestingly, it's not my favorite of the series, but I do appreciate this aspect of the series that doesn't appear anywhere else.

I'll keep it short today.  I give 'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince':

Thanks for Reading!

--Jude

A Review of 'Yellow Face' by David Henry Hwang

"'A thesis of a play, unafraid of complexities and contradictions, pepped up with a light dramatic fizz.  It asks whether race is skin-deep, actable or even fakeable, and it does so with huge wit and brio.' --TimeOut London

'A pungent play of ideas with a big heart.  Yellow Face brings to the national discussion about race a sense of humor a mile wide, an even-handed treatment and a hopeful, healing vision of a world that could be.' --Variety

The play begins with the 1990s controversy over color-blind casting for Miss Saigon before it spins into a comic fantasy, in which the character DHH pens a play in protest and the unwittingly casts a white actor as the Asian lead.  Yellow Face also explores the real-life investigation of Hwang's father, the first Asian American to own a federally chartered bank, and the espionage charges against physicist Wen Ho Lee.  Adroitly combining the light touch of comedy with weighty political and emotional issues, Hwang creates a 'lively and provocative cultural self-portrait [that] lets nobody off the hook' (The New York Times)."

This play was one that my husband read for his multicultural literature class when he was completing his bachelor's degree (don't get me started on the name of the class "multicultural literature."  It's a rant for a different day).  It's been sitting on our shelf ever since and I vowed to read it one day.  Turns out that day would come later in 2017.

In my own undergraduate education, I had started delving into this idea of Yellow Face and lack of representation of especially Asian men in performance spaces, but this digging was never really completed.  I don't think this book ends that exploration, but rather gives me some direction in that search and more importantly gives me some background.

I don't think I fully realized what a problem lack of Asian representation is, especially in today's day and age.  It's not so much that white people are taping their eyes in order to place some non-descript Asian character in a play (at least not so much anymore... although shamefully that did happen), but it comes down to when Asian people are taking parts in Hollywood roles and big-name stage plays, what roles are they getting?  Roles where Asian men are not seen as being capable of being masculine.  Sidekick roles where they are the comedic relief.  Maybe the mysterious bad guy.  Waitstaff that can barely speak English and are just caricatures.  And Asian women are seen as exotic, likely something delicate that, if you do touch, you need to be ridiculously careful.  It's a much more stagnant world out there for Asian actors than other actors of different racial backgrounds.

I don't want to claim I've been completely enlightened and that I know everything on this topic, but my eyes have been opened.  Lately my students and I have been learning a lot about race as part of our current unit and so I've been thinking a lot about this topic and I've been wanting to learn more about race and how we treat people who are different races other than white.  To a certain degree, I was on that mission at the end of 2017 too.  I'll keep learning about this as much as possible.

Specific to this play, it's a really intriguing because it digs into how we define who fits into a particular race category; how we decide.  It's also interesting because it's written in the form of a confession.  I'd be interested in rereading this again later down the line.  Maybe in 2018.  I'm reading a lot of nonfiction this year so far and have a lot more planned.

If you're interested in seeing the play as opposed to reading this play, here it is in video form:





I give 'Yellow Face':

 1/2

Thanks for Reading!

A Review of 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix' by J.K. Rowling (Audiobook)

"Harry Potter is due to start his fifth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.  His best friends Ron and Hermione have been very secretive all summer and he is desperate to get back to school and find out what has been going on.  However, what Harry discovers is far more devastating than he could ever have expected...

Suspense, secrets, and thrilling action from the pen of J.K. Rowling ensure an electrifying adventure that is impossible to put down."

Things are getting very real in the Wizarding World.

I think this is a slightly underrated part of the series.  If Goblet of Fire was the point of no return in the series, then this is the part of the series where Harry is shouldering more of the responsibility.  But not everyone is ready to hand over that responsibility to him.

This book was hard to listen to.  I've read it before and have watched the film version of it tons of times, so I knew exactly what was coming as I was listening to the audiobook version of this.  But the Umbridge in the movie is nothing like the Umbridge in the book.  I was legitimately getting angry while I was listening to the book to the point where I needed to shut the book off and walk away.  Her cruelty is unlike any other character in this series.  In a lot of ways she's worse than Voldemort because she has the backing of Fudge's ministry, so everything she's doing is, for better or for worse, legal and she's also the person doing the dirty work.  Voldemort has supporters and often has his people take care of things for him.  So coming face to face with Umbridge in her true form was an absolute nightmare.  Things in Goblet of Fire scared me and got my heart pumping, but not the way this book does.

One big complaint that I have is that things go quite slowly in this book.  Part of it is the length.  Longer works just tend to go a little more slowly.  There were things like Apparition lessons and things like that that I felt could have been spoken about, but not have entire scenes devoted to.  The wait time is a killer.

The scene at the Ministry and later in Dumbledore's office is even more devastating than I remember.  I knew that Harry loses pretty much the only parental figure he's ever known during this scene, but it wasn't really until rereading this scene that it really drove home exactly what that means.  These two scenes are also where I wish that the written and film versions were able to combine.  What I appreciated about the book version were seeing Harry realize that what a mistake he made and hearing others acknowledge that Harry's weakness is wanting to be the hero and go and save people.  I loved that in the movie, Harry realizes that, even while he was being possessed, what makes him different from Voldemort is that he has the power to love.  And he sees the people he loves.  I appreciated and was terribly pained by the scene in Dumbledore's office where Harry is sort of hit with this sense of loss-- of important people in his life, of control in his life-- and he starts destroying things.  I preferred this show of feelings rather than the quiet, still Harry portrayed in the movie.

I think this book and Goblet of Fire are the points of transition in this series.  So much change happens over these two volumes and this is when the series really grows up and takes on that much darker tone than has previously existed.

After this second reading, I realized that I really do like this book and it doesn't deserve all the hate it tends to get from people.  It's not a perfect read, but there is so much going for it all at the same time.

I give 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix':

Thanks for Reading!

--Jude