Quidditch Through the Ages

J. K. Rowling's Quidditch Through the Ages is a wizarding sports history for 9 year olds, written completely straight as though the game were real.

What happens

There is no story here and no plot to follow. This is a reference book, the sort of thing a Hogwarts pupil would take off a library shelf, and it behaves like one all the way through. Chapters, dates, footnotes, museum exhibits, a bit of dry academic sniping.

That is exactly what makes it fun.

It opens with the question of why wizards fly on brooms at all. Why not carpets, or barrels, or armchairs? The answer given is beautifully practical. A broom leaning in the corner needs no explaining if a neighbour walks in.

Then come the early broom games, and this is where your reader will start reading bits out loud. There was a German game where players tried to burst a dragon bladder on a pole. There was an Irish one where you flew a goat's gallbladder through burning barrels without catching fire yourself.

And there was a Scottish game called Creaothceann, where a hundred boulders were dropped from the sky and players wore cauldrons on their heads to catch them. It was banned in 1762 and the book tells you why, with a verse of the poem written about it.

One thing to flag. This book does not tidy up its own history. Creaothceann killed a great many people. The Golden Snidget, the little bird the Snitch was invented to replace, was hunted to near-extinction and often crushed by whoever caught it. Its own author is clearly on the birds' side, and there is a wonderful eyewitness letter from a witch who charges onto the pitch to rescue one. But if your reader minds animals coming to harm, they will mind this.

If your reader already knows the world, the pleasure is in the detail. Quidditch is traced from a diary kept by a witch who could only name one day of the week, through a cheerful letter to a Norwegian cousin, to a Daily Prophet report from 1883 about angry players hurling baskets at a Ministry official.

It is a book to dip into rather than read straight through, which suits a certain kind of reader down to the ground. Short sections, facts you can repeat, nothing to lose your place in.

What to read next

If they like this one, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is in the library too. It is the companion volume, another Hogwarts textbook set out as a proper reference work, this time an A to Z of magical creatures, and this edition is scribbled all over by Harry and his friends.