Ever since I read the first four Harry Potter books out loud to one of my children, I’ve been mystified by the Potter phenomenon. Sure, the stories are inventive, and it’s wonderful that so many children have been attracted to books by the series. But Rowling can’t write to save her life. The prose clunks along.

So I find Robert McCrum in The Observer far more satisfactory than Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times.

Here’s McCrum: “As usual, Rowling’s prose runs the gamut from torpid to pedestrian.” Kakutani, on the other hand, is swept away: “Indeed, the achievement of the Potter books is the same as that of the great classics of children’s literature, from the Oz novels to The Lord of the Rings: the creation of a richly imagined and utterly singular world, as detailed, as improbable and as mortal as our own.”