I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed this book. As a Harry Potter fan it was nice to head back to Hogwarts and follow a new(ish) crowd. The story had me guessing start to finish, with a few surprises along the way.

Having read the original books there were one or two things that niggled at me. The first was students going into each others dorms. Now, I understand that this is a new age, but it just felt a little odd. The second was finding different aged students in the same lessons. I'm not sure if this happens in real boarding schools, but again, it was something that was strange to read. Lastly was the lesson on paintings. Now I could be wrong, or not know my HP facts, but according to the lesson only simple, 2D characters could move between other paintings that were not their own. Fully magically charmed characters could only travel between the paintings of themselves, but not enter another person's painting. If this is so, then surely the fat lady, or the knight Sir Cadogan, could not travel between paintings as they did in the original stories. Just something I've been pondering. If I have my facts wrong then you can ignore my musings.

The only major problem I had was with the formatting of speech. A new person speaking means a new paragraph. G. Norman Lippert didn't do this, probably as a result of the overall paragraph formatting. However, that being said, I didn't find myself getting lost when people were speaking (which has been the case in other self-published novels I've read, where different people's words were lumped together).

So all in all, despite the niggles I would definitely recommend this story to HP fans, and I'm starting #2 directly.