Day 1; The Boy who Lived

Ok, as promised, I'm back to start reviewing the Potter series.

The book-
This first chapter, The Boy who Lived, is one of the best first chapters I've read. We get a kind of prolougue to the whole series here. We start witth what is possibly the first paragraph in book history, convincing us the Dursleys are perfectly normal,thank you very much- a total lie,of course. We then see Vernon going about a normal day ,with several strange things happening-people in cloaks , shooting stars,owls- and when he returns home, he's afraid to tell Petunia about what he saw. Then Dumbledore  and McGongall show up, and we get a lot of expostion about Voldemort about the potters. We learn that we don't know how Harry survived,though Mc Gongall does ask how in the name of heaven he did.A mothers love and/or having a piece of your soul in you would be in the name of heaven, wouldn't it?  We then get Hagrid on Sirius' bike- a bike that will reappear a couple of times. And we get the first of many Boy who Lived references , who in the end,is the Boy Who Lives. One final note on the book; not once in this chapter are the words magic or wizard uttered. we just know there's something unusual about these people and of course Harry.
Pottermore
The Pottermore experience begins with the registartion process. It is all standard site registartion procedure- name, date of birth, etc, with one important difference; you can't pick your own username for child safety reasons. Rather, you get to pick from a list of various combinations of magical items. I got keyquest23666,which only sounds vaguely magical. After this, you are delivered   to the main portal for Pottermore ,which  looks like a maze with 7 icons, each representing a different book. There are circles  surrounding the icons , which take you to different chapters for that book. Chapter 1 of Socerer's Stone is fairly unexciting,with not much to explore. You discover bonus material and stuff to collect by zooming in using the up and down arrow keys and clicking certain items. The only bonus material here is info on why Rowling chose the address Number 4 Privet Drive- after the proivet flower, and she thought 4 was a hard, cold number- and info on why wizards don't use metric.- they find the calcuations easy. As I said, there were no real relevations here,and not much to discuss. The detail in the animation was incredible, and some items took me a while to find. I'll be back Wedensday to discuss the first chapter Harry actually appears , and his first encounter with a snake.