Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Okay, so we've been reading "Harry Potter" books together. I openly admit that the Harry Potter books are some of my favorite and have been heavily influential in my life in general (hard to believe? Literature has that power).

I really think that "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" is a classic.

Chamber of Secrets (book 2)? Not so much.

Spoiler Alert here--if you don't want to know the ending, stop reading here.

Okay, so I've been reading it out loud to the kids. Reading aloud is one of the best ways to spot flaws in a manuscript. Not only did we find an honest-to-goodness typo, the books is really full of holes. It's not very well written, to be honest.

The problems are scattered throughout the book, but I think one of the biggest of all is in the plumbing.

Yes. The Plumbing.

The Castle has plumbing.

Necessary in a school, right? Right.

But they clearly state that the castle was built a thousand years ago. BEFORE indoor plumbing.

So maybe they added it later? Possibly.

Except that the entrance to the hidden chamber of secrets that was put in when the castle was built is...through a SINK in the bathroom. And the monster? It travels through the pipes.

And since they clearly state that the first time the chamber of secrets was even FOUND was a mere 50 years before, you can't really argue that someone added the sink-entrance later when they added the bathrooms and the plumbing. They would have merely walled up the old entrance, not knowing it was even there.

Plus, the plumbing that exists isn't very reasonable--an enormous gigantic snake travels through it. Through pipes that are concealed in the walls. Of the castle. Separate from the pipes somehow getting INTO the walls of the castle nearly a thousand years after it was built, it doesn't make mechanical sense to insert enormous gigantic pipes that a monstrous snake can slither through. You know how thick those walls would have to be? We're talking pipes the size of tube slides at water parks. That makes awfully thick walls, don't you think?