by J.K. Rowling Newton Artemis Fido Scamander, allegedly! To be clear, this is the book, not the films. I haven’t seen those, and don’t particularly feel any great draw to do so, for some reason.

Do I still warn for spoilers when the book is composed almost entirely of summaries of organisms? Of course I do. Reading is an experience, regardless of the content. Spoiler warning for the book Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, but not for the films, probably? I don’t exactly know what the films took from the book, really.

I’ve been looking forward to reading this for a while, though I’m not really sure what I was expecting. Although I enjoyed the “beastiary” section well enough, I actually found the introductory sections, about the history of classifying magic organisms, and the pains the Wizarding World goes to in continuing to hide them from Muggles. I think I would have preferred a lot more content in that section. In fact, that kind of answered a question I had never really articulated to myself: why do the magic animals need to be hidden at all? Why wouldn’t Muggles just accept, for example, that unicorns are just an odd member of the Equus genus? For some species, like dragons, it could be written off as protecting Muggles from dangerous organisms, and for others, it could be to prevent poaching. But now I see I’ve been wrong to think of “magical beasts” as just “animals, but different.” Some of them are indeed magical themselves, and would demonstrate to Muggles that parts of their physics is wrong. Others were produced purely by magic, and would seem to break the rules of biology, again showing Muggles that there was more to the world than they realized. (Would an analysis of basilisk DNA reveal it to be a combination of chicken and toad DNA? I somehow doubt that—the toad only warms the egg, but then . . . what is a basilisk’s DNA? It’s clearly not pure chicken!) And some beasts are pretty clearly not organic at all, or at least I don’t think so. The Lethifold seems to be an enchanted sheet or cloak, although perhaps I’m wrong there; fabric shouldn’t be able or required to digest food.

The tone of the actual beast entries varies from the purely humorous and whimsical to the dark and creepy, just like the actual Harry Potter series itself. It’s pretty clear that they share the same author (no offense to Mr. Scamander). Funnily enough, that also makes the magic beasts feel that much more like real animals: the Muggle world has its even share of frightening, dangerous big cats, monitor lizards and thick-skinned giant grey mammals, but also the small and tamable rodents, songbirds and pets. It seems reasonable that the same range would be present in magically produced or influenced organisms.

I know it’s a little mini-book made for charity, but boy oh boy, would I love to read the actual, full in-universe text. (You can’t tell me Hogwarts has for decades used an 88-page book as the primary text for one of its classes!)

—doctorlit will have to find a copy of Quidditch Through the Ages eventually, though he is not looking forward to the sportsball book, even if it is about magic sportsball