After his adventure with a mysterious philosopher’s eternal-life-giving stone, Harry Potter returns to his second year at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry; not alone, but accompanied by his best friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. This time the trio are again put to the test when a strange chamber is claimed to be reopened; endangering the lives of all muggle (non-magical) students at the ’safest’ school in the wizarding world.
Harry is in trouble.........again. He’s under house-arrest...........again. His uncle Dursley even employs a man to put iron-bars on Harry’s window. One night surprisingly though, he finds Ron, Fred and George Weasley outside his ’place of imprisonment’ driving a flying Ford Anglia! They help Harry escape and fly......err, drive him to the Burrow. This is where all the Weasleys reside and Harry is quite at home with the redheads, except with Ginny who seems to blush and lose speech at the mere sight of him. He soon begins to look upto Mr. and Mrs. Weasley as his parental figures, who help him along every step of the way towards the start of the new school year. At reaching Hogwarts, the students come to know that they have a new teacher this year- Professor Gilderoy Lockhart; who happens to be annoyingly (for the boys atleast) charming and breezy. He however seems to lack charisma or rather talent in teaching. His classes mostly end up in mishaps, and every male student feels that something is fishy about their handsome new tutor. As with the previous year, everything seems either good or bad at Hogwarts.......till the UGLY occurs. A strange chamber entitled the ’Chamber of Secrets’ is opened by the heir of Slytherin, though no one really knows who he/she is. Unfortunately Harry and his friends are at the wrong place at the wrong time, and our protagonist gets labeled as the aforementioned successor to Salazar Slytherin. To make matters much much worse, Harry has been hearing strange voices; voices asking him to rip, tear and kill! What is really going on? Can Harry prove his innocence or will the dark monster from the Chamber finally claim every muggle student within Hogwarts?
The narrative is as usual pretty simple and easy-to-follow; children and their parents will enjoy flipping over the pages till they reach the climax and after. The plot involves tonnes of mystery and murders, but geared towards kids. Only the last few chapters of the book deal with a dark theme; nothing a kid above 8 years of age can’t handle, but it does set the tone for the later HP novels in the series.
Final grade- A+; better than the first HP book- definitely a painstakingly written sequel.