How old were you when you started reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone? For a lucky few, myself included, we started reading it around age 11. Being the same age, or close to, as the characters gave me an insight into the books that is different when I re-read them now, as an adult. It’s not that I dislike them or can’t relate, but the bone solid feeling of “I understand” seems to be lacking. I remember hiding under the covers with my flashlight the summer that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire came out, and the various summers I was away at summer camp where I worried I wouldn’t get a copy of Order of the Phoenix or Half-Blood Prince. I attended the midnight release of Deathly Hallows and will tell anyone who asks about how I almost killed my sister when she tried to tell me the ending as soon as we got home (she had her own copy and skipped to the end just to annoy me by telling me the ending. Younger siblings, sigh).

But back to Sorcerer’s Stone…or Philosopher’s Stone, depending on what version you read (or which country you read it in). The book opens up on the day Lily and James Potter are killed protecting baby Harry from Voldemort and focuses on Petunia, Vernon and Dudley Dursley, Harry’s maternal aunt and her family. There are many arguments among fans and critics that Dumbledore did not do his due diligence in placing Harry with his estranged, wizard-hating blood family. While there are many points of interest to this argument, the first thing that stands out (beyond the fact that Dumbledore never meets the Dursleys and therefore has no idea what type of people they are) is that Dumbledore never spent any time with Harry.

Less than a year old, one could argue that babies at that stage do not have much of a personality and spending time with Harry would not have any function to placing him in a theoretically stable home. Whether you believe this argument to be true or not, I believe that if you are going to be in charge of a child’s future and never plan to check up on them, you should at least spend some time with them. How callous is it that Hagrid is sent to the destroyed home to pick up baby Harry, and Dumbledore only interacts with him enough to move him from Hagrid’s arms to the Dursley doorstep?

Now, don’t get me wrong, I like Dumbledore and believe despite his “for the greater good” mantra he did have Harry’s best interests in his limited view. But a professor or headmaster of a school, who has never interacted with the child before, during, or since, should not have such unilateral privilege. I know many aspects of Wizarding society are glossed over or not mentioned at all in the books, but are there really no Child Protective Services or other such department?

Thus concludes my reading of the first chapter of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s stone. Depending on how much I have to say about each chapter, each blog entry should focus on a single chapter.