I'm no stranger to Lorrie's well-written, eye-opening analyses - reading some of her Potter essays has opened my eyes to patterns and themes in the books that I would never have been able to put into words myself. She's a veritable genius in exposing the unsaid. And the unsaid is exactly where Severus Snape lives: as the book posits, Snape is always the story, but he is the undercover story, the submerged story. He is the hidden story, multi-interpretable, deeply confusing at times, completely o

I'm no stranger to Lorrie's well-written, eye-opening analyses - reading some of her Potter essays has opened my eyes to patterns and themes in the books that I would never have been able to put into words myself. She's a veritable genius in exposing the unsaid. And the unsaid is exactly where Severus Snape lives: as the book posits, Snape is always the story, but he is the undercover story, the submerged story. He is the hidden story, multi-interpretable, deeply confusing at times, completely opaque in his motivations. Knowing Lorrie's strength in exposing the hidden, I bought her book on Snape with full enthusiasm, even though Snape is a character that I am not personally very drawn to. (I read him as a fellow teacher, and I find it immensely hard to forgive his abominable teaching practice.)



The reason I gave the book five stars, rather than the four I would already have given it for its singing prose and razor-sharp insight, is that it genuinely gave me a new perspective on the HP series, and that is no mean feat considering I have been re-reading the series regularly for almost fifteen years. Lorrie's analyses hold up well, drawing on well-developed deductive reasoning about how Snape functions: if he did action a in situation x, it stands to reason he did action a in another similar situation, too. This is how, even when the text does not offer much support, Lorrie is able to interpret all of Snape's ostensibly contradictory action and bring it together into a cohesive reading.



The subtlety of Snape's actions, his long-term strategy, his relationships to all those around him, the depth of his sacrifices - it all finally comes to the surface in this reading, without at any time denying or excusing the fact that he sometimes perpetrates terrible bigotry and cruelty on his students. I think Lorrie is right when she posits that Snape, at his core, is someone who craves to be seen for his true self, and that the fact that this was denied to him during his life was very hard to bear at times. Somehow it touched me deeply that in Lorrie's book, he finally gets what he needed: someone to really see him. He was seen by Lily as a child, but lived a life tormented by guilt over his responsibility in her death; he was seen by Dumbledore, who he had to kill; finally at the end of his life he was seen by Harry, and Harry named his son after him (in a much-reviled move, sadly). He died knowing that Harry would know his story. And now so do we, thanks to Lorrie.



I will never love Snape. But I understand him a lot better after finishing this book, and that, in the case of Severus Snape, is probably far more valuable than loving him.

