Wizardry of a Good Read

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.”

--Ernest Hemingway, 1934

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Hemingway of course didn’t live to meet J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter’s creator, yet millions of Rowling’s young fans worldwide no doubt would see themselves in Hemingway’s words.

The fourth book about the quirky orphan who becomes a wizard went on sale last midnight, and the much-ballyhooed release of “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” was greeted with costume parties, games and rounds of hot cocoa in bookstores around the country and in Britain. Kids normally in bed long before the late news made news themselves as they dragged their work-weary parents to a place in line to get one of the 3.8 million copies in the first printing--a record for any title, let alone for a 752-page children’s book.

Rowling has sold 21 million copies since the first Harry Potter novel debuted in 1998. The inevitable merchandising machine has revved up with Harry Potter fan clubs, Web sites and a Harry Potter movie in the works. But there is real magic to Rowling’s series, projected to run seven volumes. It comes not from the wizards of Madison Avenue but the charm of Potter and his fellow students at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Scholars of children’s literature would no doubt say that the Harry Potter books share common ground with many other kid classics: a complex plot, dark and deliciously fantastical; vivid characters, and writing that doesn’t talk down to children. Kids would simply say that Rowling’s success comes from a magical story that neither they nor many of their parents can put down, one that has youngsters reading with a flashlight under the bedsheets and whispering in class the next day. A good story, well told.

In this, Harry and his companions join a long line of characters in children’s tales that have lasted--like “Little Women,” the Hardy Boys mysteries, “Tom Sawyer,” “The Chronicles of Narnia,” “The Hobbit,” “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and, of course, Frank Baum’s enduring Wizard of Oz stories. Harry Potter’s success has secured Rowling herself a place in the circle of children’s authors whose stories transcend changing generations and tastes--Roald Dahl, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Judy Blume, Maurice Sendak and Madeline L’Engle, to name a few.

Television, video games and the itchiness of childhood often conspire to keep kids from a long, good read. But even on a stifling July afternoon, stories with staying power still cast their spell, as wondrous as those owls swooping low on the day that Harry Potter, the baby with a lightning-bolt scar on his forehead, was scooped up in his blankets and spirited away from Privet Drive into a deliciously long and extraordinary adventure.