The Plot Against Harry
"Young wizard battles evil, deals with puberty" on Slate:

What a bummer when that genial Hollywood company-man Chris Columbus was hired to direct the movie of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001). The adaptation was faithful to a fault, but the picture was a bland, twinkling, Christmassy thing that missed or muffled the book's emotional beats, and it had none of the subversive energy out of which J.K. Rowling's Harry had been forged. I'm not saying Rowling is some kind of Riot Grrrrl. But despite the headmistressy civility of her prose and her insistence on a disciplined and controlled nonconformity, her books express a rage against a certain fascistic strain of the blue-blood English upper crust and their clueless allies, the vulgarly snobbish middle-class mortals known memorably as "muggles." Every book begins with the lonely, friendless, maltreated orphan Harry shut in his room, practicing his magic in secret—just as Rowling must have shut herself away to summon up the pagan fury at the core of each new adventure.
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