Humdrum story with a magic end

Oddly, Sean Smith fell in love with J. K. Rowling when he heard her on Desert Island Discs: only later did he read Harry Potter.

It was, he tells us, her choice of Everybody Hurts by REM that intrigued him ? and the fact that she told Sue Lawley that whenever she heard Beethoven's Appassionata she would imagine herself playing the piece to an enthralled audience. When she also mentioned that her late mother had a 'galloping' form of multiple sclerosis ? diagnosed when Rowling was 15 ? he decided to find out more. The result is this book.

There cannot be a child in the land who does not know the name J. K. Rowling or that of her fictional hero, Harry Potter, the boy wizard with a lightning bolt across his forehead.

The first four books about his exploits at Hogwart's School have so far sold 100 million copies, and Rowling ? once an impoverished single mother ? is now reputed to be worth about ?65million.

But as she would probably be the first to admit, while Harry's life is truly magical, her own story is rather more humdrum. Stretched by Smith to fill 200 opportunist pages, it is about as interesting as one of Professor Snape's more boring Potions classes.

Joanne Rowling, a bookish child, grew up in a village called Tutshill, close to the River Wye. Her father worked in engineering, her mother was a lab technician at Joanne's comprehensive school. As a teenager, she liked Jane Austen and Jessica Mitford, although she read French at Exeter University. Even her student days were not exactly wild: Smith says Rowling's only naughtiness was failing to return her library books on time.

On graduation, Rowling landed a job teaching in Portugal, where she met and fell in love with Jorge Arantes, a journalism student. The pair married and had a daughter, Jessica, but the relationship was a disaster. After one particularly fearful row, Rowling took her daughter and fled to Edinburgh where her sister Dianne was living. She later took out the Scottish equivalent of a restraining order against him.

It was then, when she was miserably scraping by on state benefits, that Rowling began writing Harry Potter.

The now legendary story of how she spent her days scribbling away in a cafe, trying to make a coffee last half the morning because her own home was so cold is not, we're told, entirely true. She simply wanted good coffee and the sound of other people's voices.

Eventually, she sent off her manuscript and Bloomsbury nabbed it in 1996 for just ?1,500. After lunch with his newest author, Barry Cunningham, then head of the company's children's book division, shook Rowling's hand and said: 'You'll never make any money out of children's books, Jo.' Rowling, who fiercely guards her privacy, will be dreading publication of this book, but she need have no fear.

I tired of it before she had found her first proper boyfriend. When a biographer tells the reader his subject got three badges in the Brownies and that her journey to university necessitated a change of trains at Bristol, it is not a very promising sign. The book hums with ordinariness: unlike his unwilling subject, Sean Smith does not know how to cast a literary spell.