My daughter and I started reading Harry Potter 1 today. We read Chapter 1 aloud, taking turns, and also taking frequent breaks to discuss. The breaks were all prompted by her questions.
Why doesn’t Mr. Dursley just tell his wife what he saw?
Why are the owls flying everywhere?
Doesn’t Harry have any other family he could live with?
Why was Voldemort afraid of Dumbledore?
And on and on…
Fans of Harry Potter know that all of these questions get answered eventually. But in this first chapter, it’s pretty amazing how much suspense Rowling created with all the pieces she left out. My daughter could barely contain herself and begged me to just tell her already! I didn’t, of course. We’ll have to keep reading.
As readers, we barely even notice what’s told to us and what isn’t. We’re so practiced at reading novels we take what the author gives us and keep going. We’re interested in the world that gets created in chapter 1, and the amusing, colorful characters. And because we’re interested, we’re asking the same questions my daughter did, but we’re doing it in our minds and we don’t even realize it. We don’t stop to think about why we’re interested, we just are, and we eagerly move on to Chapter 2 to find answers.
