| Product Summary | | Format: Hardcover | | ISBN: 9780439784542 | | Publisher: Scholastic Inc | | Publish Date: 7/16/2005 | | Buy.com Sku: 39979371 | | Item#: R26Y43 | | Buy.com Sales Rank: 68426 | | Dimensions (in Inches) 9.25H x 6.25L x 2T | | Pages: 652 | | Age Range: 13 to 16 |
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| | | | "It was nearing midnight and the Prime Minister was sitting alone in his office, reading a long memo that was slipping through his brain without leaving the slightest trace of meaning behind. He was waiting for a call from the President of a far distant country, and between wondering when the wretched man would telephone, and trying to suppress unpleasant memories of what had been a very long, tiring, and difficult week, there was not much space in his head for anything else..." (from the first line) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is the 6th volume in the thrilling, moving, bestselling Harry Potter series!
From the Publisher:
The war against Voldemort is not going well; even Muggle governments are noticing. Ron scans the obituary pages of the Daily Prophet, looking for familiar names. Dumbledore is absent from Hogwarts for long stretches of time, and the Order of the Phoenix has already suffered losses.
And yet...
As in all wars, life goes on. Sixth-year students learn to Apparate -- and lose a few eyebrows in the process. The Weasley twins expand their business. Teenagers flirt and fight and fall in love. Classes are never straightforward, though Harry receives some extraordinary help from the mysterious Half-Blood Prince.
So it's the home front that takes center stage in the multilayered sixth installment of the story of Harry Potter. Here at Hogwarts, Harry will search for the full and complex story of the boy who became Lord Voldemort -- and thereby find what may be his only vulnerability.
Annotation:
Packed with mystery, subterfuge, and a more intimate understanding of the challenges that lie ahead of him, Harry Potter's sixth year at Hogwarts heaves with his growing sense of responsibility regarding the defeat of Lord Voldemort, a relentlessly sneaking suspicion that classmate Draco Malfoy is a Death Eater in cahoots with the dastardly Professor Snape, and a host of romantic entanglements that hilariously plague everyone. Harry's busy N.E.W.T.-level schedule includes Potions, where he surprises himself by excelling due to strangely helpful, hand-written margin notes in his book, ascribed only to the enigmatic "Half-Blood Prince." Sporadic, private lessons with Dumbledore center on the personal history of Lord Voldemort, which both unnerves and fascinates Harry. At the same time, the romantic ups and downs of Ron and Hermione threaten to destroy their friendship. The sixth installation in the phenomenally successful Harry Potter series opened with record-breaking sales of an estimated 6.9 million books on July 16, 2005. Named both one of Publishers Weekly's Best Children's Books of 2005 and a New York Times Notable Book of 2005.
| PraisePublishers Weekly Annex
"If Harry grew up in the last book, here he becomes a man, learning the true impact of the last book's prophecy, and the importance of love as the antidote to fear." 07/18/2005New York Times
"[T]he achievement of the Potter books is the same as that of the great classics of children's literature, from the Oz novels to THE LORD OF THE RINGS: the creation of a richly imagined and utterly singular world, as detailed, as improbable and as mortal as our own." - Michiko Kakutani 07/16/05 Time
"Love is much more important to Rowling than magic. The real mystery, for her, is the human heart. She has always been more interested in the hand that wields the wand, the way the enchantment illuminates the wizard who casts it." 07/25/2005 New York Times Book Review
"To read Rowling's novels as an adult is to sink into a half-remembered state of childhood rapture, the trance produced when you gobbled up fantasies for the first time. In the series's fourth volume, ''HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE,'' Dumbledore lets Harry stumble across the Pensieve, a collecting dish for excess memories. To extract a memory, a wizard holds a wand to his temple, draws a silvery strand of thought from his head and taps it into the basin. Any wizard who touches the swirling contents of the bowl drops into the visions it contains, reliving them as if he had been present at their inception. Dipping into the fiction that is Rowling's Pensieve, adult readers tumble into an eerie but familiar realm, containing not only Rowling's images of Harry but their own memories of books they loved when they were Harry's age and younger." - Liesl Schillinger 07/31/2005 Kirkus online
"This newest excursion into the Potterverse will leave readers pleased, amused, excited, scared, infatuated, delighted, sad, surprised, thoughtful...." 07/25/2005 Entertainment Weekly
"I admit, it's a bit of a shock to realize that Harry Potter is quite nearly an adult...It's heartening, both as an author and a reader, to see that J.K. Rowling is brave enough to experiment with her beloved series, and that she has remained true to the emotional and physical development of her characters." - Christopher Paolini 07/29/2005 |
| Author Bio| J. K. Rowling | | One night, as a young J. K. (Joanne Kathleen) Rowling traveled from Manchester to London by train, an idea for a book about a boy wizard named Harry Potter formed in her mind. It would change the course of her life forever. As a young girl growing up in Chepstow, Gwent, a historic town near the Lower Wye Valley in Southern England, Rowling loved to tell stories, and started to write them down when she was 6-years-old. Throughout her schooling, she entertained her friends during lunchtime with fantastic made-up stories. After studying French at the University of Exeter, Rowling went on to work in London, until at age 26, she moved to Portugal to teach English as a second language. There, she married, became pregnant, and worked on her Harry Potter manuscript whenever she had a spare second. The death of her own mother made his orphaned state much more real to her. Rowling's marriage ended in divorce, and she moved to Edinburgh with her newborn daughter, Jessica. ||After five years of writing, and a year's worth of publisher rejections, HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE was bought by Bloomsbury (U.K.) and published in June 1997. Shortly after Bloomsbury bought the manuscript, the rights were sold in America, where it was published in September 1998 as HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER'S STONE. Her book not only received lavish praise, winning the British Book Awards Children's Book of the Year and the Smarties Prize, but earned Rowling enough money to quit teaching and write full time. Her six subsequent Harry Potter books, all spectacular bestsellers, have continued to receive British and American awards, and are all being made into films. Having reached her lifelong dream of becoming a professional writer, Rowling encourages children who want to write to read as much as they can. |
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