NANCY ARCAYNA / NARCAYNA@STARBULLETIN.COM
Michael Crouse, 7, left, dressed as the nasty young wizard Draco Malfoy for the Harry Potter party Friday night at Borders Books & Music in Waikele. Tyler Crouse, 9, was Harry.
2 ‘Potter’ prognosticators
prove their divination skills"It is time for me to tell you what I
should have told you five years ago,
Harry. Please sit down. I am going
to tell you everything. ..."
The wise and kindly Professor Dumbledore says this to Harry Potter in Chapter 37 of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," the chapter called "The Lost Prophecy."
What comes next? Our "Dumbledore's Secret" contest challenged Potter fans to take a guess, and a couple came pretty darned close.
Finding Harry
Most Honolulu bookstores and all Costco locations have sold out of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." Only these stores reported a good supply last night:Bestsellers Books & Music: Bishop Square (528-2378), Hilton Hawaiian Village (953-2378), Honolulu Airport (836-2378)
Waldenbooks: Kahala Mall only (737-9550)
Worth checking: Some stores said they'd release a few unclaimed reserved books today; new shipments are expected this week.
Most entrants were children, and the favorite answer was a hopeful one: that Harry's parents were not really dead. The No. 2 most popular answer was that Dumbledore was actually Harry's grandfather.
One, however, took the "Star Wars" approach (remember how Darth Vader turned out to be Luke Skywalker's father?). She guessed that our hero Harry would turn out to be related to the ultimate bad guy, Lord Voldemort.
Now for the real answer. If you haven't finished the book and want to keep everything a surprise, don't read any further. Actually, though, this snippet will not spoil the book for you. It sort of fleshes out the story and sets up future Harry adventures.
It takes seven pages to get from that introductory quote to the payoff, which is this: "Voldemort tried to kill you when you were a child because of a prophecy made shortly before your birth."
Sibyll Trelawney, the professor of divination whom no one takes seriously, spoke the prophecy "on a cold, wet night 16 years ago." She told Dumbledore that the person with the power to defeat Voldemort would be born at the end of the seventh month, to parents who had three times defied the Dark Lord. All of this fits Harry. Plus, Voldemort would mark the child as his equal (the scar) -- "and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives."
Congratulations to Dominic Reiss, 11, and Amy Carvalho, 16, who struck closest to the truth. Both came up with the idea of a prediction by Trelawney that Harry would have the power to defeat Voldemort. Reiss' sister, Angela, had a similar guess, although she tied that power to Harry's half-Muggle heritage, which is not part of the prophecy.
Both Dominic and Amy said they found clues leading to their answers in previous parts of the series, where Trelawney and her predictions have been mentioned. (By the way, Dominic finished all 896 pages of "Phoenix" between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. Saturday. That's devotion.)
Both winners will receive copies of the new book as their prize.
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‘Phoenix’ sets sales
records around globe
Harry Potter just keeps topping himself.
"We expected to sell 1 million copies in the first week, and we sold that many within the first 48 hours," Barnes & Noble Inc. CEO Steve Riggio said yesterday as "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" set records around the world in its first weekend.
Nobody in publishing had seen anything like it, at least since the last Potter book came out three years ago. Borders Group Inc. reported worldwide sales of 750,000 the first day. Amazon.com shipped out more than a million copies of the new book, making Saturday the largest distribution day of a single item in e-commerce history.
In London the supermarket chain Tesco said it sold 317,400 copies of the fifth in J.K. Rowling's fantasy series in the first 24 hours, seven times the number sold in the first week of Potter IV, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire."
"The book has now broken all our sales records, and there is no doubt that this will be the best-selling book we have ever stocked," said Tesco book buyer Caroline Ridding.
Some retailers had worried that even an enormous first printing, 8.5 million in the United States alone, wouldn't last long enough to keep up with demand. A lot of latecomers found themselves settling for a mere pre-order in place of a book.
Riggio said many Barnes & Noble stores had run out of copies and that more would arrive "over the next few days."
The release of Potter V was not flawless. Givens Books in Lynchburg, Va., discovered that more than 40 of its copies were missing 33 pages. Scholastic Inc., the U.S. publisher of Potter, said the books would be replaced.
Rowling's first four Potter books have sold an estimated 192 million copies worldwide and have been published in at least 55 languages and distributed in more than 200 countries.
Blockbuster movies were made of the first two books, and the movie stemming from the third will be released next year.
All the hype for Harry didn't stop critics from enjoying "Order of the Phoenix." The New York Times, in a rare front-page review, praised the author's "bravura storytelling skills and tirelessly inventive imagination." USA Today cited Rowling's "wonderful, textured writing." The Associated Press said: "It was worth the wait. And then some."
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