A reader forwarded us this

A reader forwarded us this cute review of the Comic Relief books by a 9-year old. It appeared in the Canberra Times:

I AM NEARLY 10 years old, and have known and loved Harry Potter for half my life. I expect to love him for all the rest of it too. Like everyone else, I am waiting for J. K. Rowling’s fifth installment of the adventures of Harry Potter at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. To make that wait easier, Rowling has now written two little, extra books about Hogwarts. One of them pretends to be Harry’s own copy, with all his scribbled notes over the pages. The other, we are told, was borrowed by Harry from the library. Both books are so battered and biffed up that they could really have come from a school. Harry has written all over Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them to correct the entries for beasts he has fought, like the basilisk (a serpent bred from a chicken egg hatched under a toad) and the Hungarian horn-billed dragon. Harry says that a beast is ‘a big hairy thing with too many legs’, and there are lots of them here, like clabberts, diricawls, mackled malaclaws and doxies (biting fairies). The aeromantula seems especially scary. It is ‘a monstrous eight-eyed spider capable of human speech’.

Quidditch Through The Ages is the story of the most exciting game of all for people who do not know Aussie Rules. Quidditch is played high in the air, on broomsticks, with four balls (including two ‘bludgers’ up to no good), a quaffle, and a golden snitch (which replaced rare birds the players used to biff). Rowling traces the story of the game from Queerditch Marsh a thousand years ago. She reckons quidditch is really popular in Australia, because we have lots of open spaces, and that the Woolongong Skinny is a really clever move in a game. She cannot spell Wollongong, but she does explain the differences between blagging, blatching and bumphing. All the money from these books is going to be given away, to the poorest people in the poorest places. They are good books anyway, but that is an extra reason to buy them.