What is Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets About and Why Should I Care? It introduces a slightly grimmer side to Hogwarts and to Harry, while still keeping things light for the kids who enjoyed Sorcerer's Stone. Chamber of Secrets serves as an important transitional book to the isolation and darkness of Prisoner of Azkaban, but especially Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix. Yeah, Harry's a wizard – but that's not going to solve all of his social problems. At the same time, Harry's first experience of teasing and exclusion at Hogwarts reminds us that, while the wizarding world may be filled with strange and wonderful things, wizards are still human beings with the same troubles that we share. The short length and relative straightforwardness of the plot keeps the tone consistent with Book 1. So instead, Rowling kept Chamber of Secrets to a cool three-hundred-odd pages. could have soldiered on, included that information there and that would have been messed up the later plot the revelations about the half-blood, for instance, would have blown a lot of things open' ( source). However, as she wrote, she realized she 'had two major plots here that really did not work too well together side by side, so one had to be pulled out, it became clear immediately that. Sound familiar? Yep, that's the sixth book – originally, she was going to include the Half-Blood Prince storyline alongside this narrative of Tom Riddle's diary. The current shape of Chamber of Secrets came as a surprise even to Rowling, who started out the second book under the working title Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. The book appeared in England on July 2, 1998, and in the States on June 2, 1999, topping bestseller lists in both countries.

We'd regret not having this second installment in the series, filled as it is with priceless characters like Gilderoy Lockhart and young-but-still-evil Tom Riddle. Rowling's worries about sudden fame didn't stop her from finishing Chamber of Secrets. I was happy about that, but it also frightened me because I thought I cannot reproduce this, it is a flash in the pan, I was temporarily blocked in writing Chamber of Secrets. Rowling recalls:Īt one third of the way into writing, Stone had this huge success which was totally unexpected. Imagine the pressure that Rowling must have felt to make Chamber of Secrets as – or more – awesome than the first book. Then, suddenly, your world changes entirely: you're hugely famous (and rich), not only in your own country but around the world. So, picture for yourself a woman working in relative peace on a new book project.

Never in my wildest imaginings had I pictured my face in the papers – particularly captioned, as they almost all were, with the words 'penniless single mother.' It is hard to be defined by the most difficult part of your life. The stakes seemed to have gone up a lot, and I attracted a lot of publicity in Britain for which I was utterly unprepared. Once Harry appeared on the US market in 1998, Rowling became an international celebrity. Following the runaway success of the first Harry Potter book, US publishers launched a bidding war involving six-figure dollar amounts for the rights to bring the Harry Potter novels stateside ( source). Rowling was in the middle of writing Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets when the first Harry Potter novel ( Harry Potter and the Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone) came out in Britain in 1997.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets IntroductionĪuthor J.K.

Chamber of secrets cast of characters