The Secret of Platform Thirteen

This little book by Eva Ibbotson is either an accidental or deliberate Harry Potter rip-off. There's another world filled with magic; there's a boy living with an unsympathetic family who doesn't actually belong there; there's a rescue mission involving an giant; they have to go to King's Cross station and . . . you get the picture. There's no school, though, and it's not so well written, and there's a lot of time spent on really unpleasant and boring characters. But it's still unsettlingly similar. It's also a waste of time.