"I enjoyed this one most out of the five so far. It's the one where the characters get on best, their personalities come through very well, the story moves along and you find out more of Harry's background, and the school life is shown well. So why does it get only one star?
"It gets one because it falls apart with Hermione and her time-travel thing. That undermines everything because suddenly anything anywhere can be changed. If you can suddenly mess about with time, then Voldermort could just go back and kill Harry's parents, or kill anyone in his direct family before he was born and suddenly NO MORE HARRY. It's such a massive plot hole and I can't believe JKR used it because it blows the series totally. If time travel is possible in Harry's world then nothing is ever final because everything can change at any moment, depending on who is controlling time itself. Big mistake, in terms of plot development.
"Try reading books four and five without thinking about Hermione's time piece. They don't work at all, because they should be very different once the principle of time travel is applied to them. If Harry could wind the clock back, suddenly the cause of all the problems in those books don't need to happen in the first place. Ooops.
"If like me you love the idea of time travel then try reading ones where it's all been thought through properly, and the stories have been built on it. The Time Traveller's Wife is good, The Time Machine of course, and The Odessa Stone and The Guardian Of Time. They're all based on the effects and so on about messing with time or observing time passing by, and they work brilliantly because the principles get established about what's going on - and who's in charge of them! Most important, they're well thought out.
"So if you can ignore the pitfall of JKR's folly in this one, which most people seem to do very easily, then you'll really enjoy the whole story, and the whole series as well. For me though, it's the most enjoyable story but it leaves a really big mess afterwards - but only if you think about it."
Review of Review: So this is your favourite of the five so far, "A Customer". And you've given it one star. What on earth possessed you to carry on? Are you some sort of masochist? I bet you wish you had access to a time machine, so you could meet your younger self and say, "Tell you what, A Customer, if I were you (and, let's face it, I was) I'd give the whole Harry Potter business a miss."
But then, if you didn't read the books, you'd never feel the need to go back in time to tell your younger self to give Rowling a wide berth. And you'd end up reading them. It's a paradox, and no mistake. I think you should let sleeping dogs lie.
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