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AUTHOR: Joanne K. Rowling
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TYPE of book: Fantasy story
MAIN CHARACTERS: Harry Potter. He is very slender. Nothing except the
scar on his forehead shows that he is the most famous boy in the Wizard-World. He is famous because he survived a Death Curse when he was a baby and reflected it back onto the darkest wizard, Lord Voldemort. The Dark Lord nearly died and fled. Now Harry is thirteen.
Ron Weasley is Harry´s best friend. He is tall , has red hair like everybody in his family and lots and lots of freckles. He comes from a real old wizarding family and he has got five brothers and a younger sister. They are all very poor.
Hermione Granger is Harry´s other best friend. She comes from a Muggle family (muggles are people who are not able to do magic). Her parents are dentists. Hermione´s teeth are rabbit-like and her brown hair is very bushy. She is an intelligent girl and she learns much because she wants to get good marks.
The Dursleys are Harry´s only relatives. They are a perfectly normal Muggle family from Aunt Marge to Cousin Dudley, only Harry doesn´t fit in.
Dementors guard the prison Azkaban, where the most dangerous wizards are kept. They are ugly creatures which hide under large coats with hoods. They suck the good feelings out of the people. They haven´t got faces, only one big mouth and they are all slimy.
THE STORY TAKES PLACE AT: Hogwarts school of witchcraft and wizardry. Hogwarts is a school for teenage-wizards. It is in northern England. There are four houses: Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, Slytherin and Gryffindor. Harry is a Gryffindor just as Ron and Hermione are.
Harry´s greatest opponent, Draco Malfoy, lives in Slytherin; Headmaster of Hogwarts is Albus Dumbledore. He is a tall man with long silver hair and bright eyes behind half-moon spectacles. He has also got a huge, crooked nose.
PLOT: At the beginning Marge Dursley visited the Dursleys. She was so mean that Harry lost control of himself and blew her up like a balloon by accident. He had enough of his "family" and ran away. There he first noticed the big black dog which would follow him from that time on. In the bus to London he heard that Sirius Black, a well-known murderer, had got himself free from Azkaban. Nobody knew how he could have managed this. Some years ago Sirius Black had killed 13 people.
Accidentally Harry heard that Black was after him to finish Voldemort´s dark plan of his revenge.
At school Harry and his friends noticed that Hagrid, their faithful friend, had become the new Care of Magical Creatures teacher. In the first lesson he showed them Hippogriffs, but Malfoy didn´t follow Hagrids instructions and a Hippogriff nearly bit his hand off.
At the end of the year Harry, Ron and Hermione found out that Sirius Black hadn´t been after Harry, but after Scabbers, Ron´s old rat which wasn´t a real animal. In fact Scabbers was a wizard who had turned himself into a rat. There aren´t many wizards in the world, who are able to do this. They are called Animagi. Peter Pettigrew alias Scabbers alias Wormtail had tricked all the famous wizards. All of them thought that Sirius Black, Harry´s godfather, had murdered Lily and James Potter and 13 other people (including Peter Pettigrew), but it was all Wormtail´s fault.
Wormtail escaped and nobody believed their story except Dumbledore.
Bad luck for Sirius, who had been caught.
Harry and Hermione saved Buckbeak, the Hippogriff which would have been killed by an executioner of Malfoy´s fellows. Sirius was caught by the Dementors but Harry and Hermione went back in the real time and brought Buckbeak to Sirius´ prison at Hogwarts.
He flew away and promised to write very often. Harry was very sad because now he had to go back to the Dursleys during the summer holidays.
When they were on the train towards home the first letter from Sirius arrived and Ron got a little owl with the post. Sirius had thought it would be nice to get him one because now his rat was gone and it was sort of his fault.
KEY SCENE: Our favourite Scene is shortly before Harry and his friends found out that Sirius wasn't after Harry. A dog had carried Ron and Scabbers off. Harry and Hermione were looking for them.
.The wand light showed Harry the trunk of a thick tree; they had chased Scabbers into the shadow of the Whomping Willow and its branches were creaking as though in a high wind, whipping backwards and forwards to stop them going nearer.
And there, at the base of the trunk, was the dog, dragging Ron backwards into a large gap in the roots - Ron was fighting furiously, but his head and torso were slipping out of sight -
" Ron!" Harry shouted, trying to follow, but a heavy branch whipped lethally trough the air and he was forced backwards again.
All they cold see now was one of Ron' s legs, which he had hooked around a root in an effort to stop the dog pulling him further underground. Then a horrible crack cut the air like a gunshot; Ron' s leg had broken, and next second, his foot had vanished from sight.
PERSONAL OPINION: We like the book Harry Potter and the prisoner of Azkaban, because it is a fantasy - story but you can imagine that this is all true and it is very funny written.
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