Half the joy of being a Harry Potter reader is the time spent alone with books, curled up quietly while adventures and dragons and feasts come to life in your mind.
The other half is the joy of being part of a fandom – a community, in person and online – that has shared the same loves and debated the same theories. Chamber of Secrets, in particular, is scattered throughout with clues to mysteries, some of which are not resolved until the end of the full series. There are several kinds of experiences going on at once for the readers of Chamber of Secrets, and Alohomora!’s second companion volume is a well-informed guide to them all.
Along with analysis of the story, each chapter contains sidebars about timelines, fan lore, and larger themes. The sidebars about the Ring Composition structure of each Harry Potter novel underscore their kinship with classical heroic epics. It’s often said that the Harry Potter series taught a generation of children to read. When this guidebook points out the neatly symmetrical plot references in each half of Chamber of Secrets, centering around the turning point of the middle chapters, fans who first read these books as children will recognize that they noticed and enjoyed these symmetries at the time, “without knowing the literary theory behind their inception” (p31).
The “Closer Look” special features are my favorite. The one called “Dark Magic 101” points out that “Harry encounters Dark Magic at nearly every turn” in Chamber of Secrets and this is a significant addition to the world of this story. The villains in this volume aspire to genocide based on blood supremacy: the struggle between good and evil is more urgent and uncomfortably real than it was in the first volume.
The feature called “Harry Should’ve Been in Slytherin” explores how the story could have been different – and better – if Harry and the Sorting Hat had made a different choice. How would Harry’s considerable cunning and ambition have been supported in a different House? How would the Slytherins have responded to Harry’s vehement objections to snobbery if he’d been one of their own?
This is exactly the kind of vigorous “what if” discussion that has flourished in HP fandom since the beginning, and it’s the kind of thing you’ll find in this companion volume. It’s the closest a book can come to the experience of being a Harry Potter reader in real life, in community.