From: agoldschlager at penguinputnam.com <agoldschlager>
Date: Thu, 11 Nov 1999 13:54:36 -0500

I have been giving a lot of thought about Harry Potter over the past several months, and certain thoughts, questions (and answers) have occurred to me. I apologize if I ramble a little.

First, my background: I have loved sf/fantasy novels since forever, and enjoyed children's books long past the "appropriate" age to read them (I'll never forget sneaking down to the "children's room" in high school to go get the rest of Susan Cooper's DARK IS RISING series). In my (short) publishing career, I have worked as an editor both of adult sf/fantasy novels and of children's books. And it is my long-term goal to create a YA sf/fantasy line that "works" --i.e., isn't based on one author (Alexander or Rowling or McKinley or L'Engle or whoever); has fine writing and is commercial; and has books that both kids and adults can read.

 It seems to me (and would value feedback) that sf/fantasy in general tends to have more crossover appeal than many other genres--i.e., kids will read adult sf novles and adults will read YA novels, and there are a multitude of books in the genre that are written on the line between YA and adult books. I think that Harry Potter helps support this point. Can anyone think of mainstream novels that have recently had the same kind of crossover appeal?

Here are the questions that I've been pondering:

Why do I like the Harry Potter books so much?

I think because they combine the fantasy novel with another type of novel that I love: the boarding school novel. Two of my favorite novels growing up were Nordstrom's THE SECRET LANGUAGE and L'Engle's AND BOTH WERE YOUNG.

I love the Roald Dahl-like nature of the Dursleys (I keep expecting a giant peach to crush the Dursleys, a la Aunts Sponge and Spiker. ) I also like the fact that although the early books in the series are aimed at kids, Harry and his friends face genuine danger, as in Cooper's novels, say. One of the things that has always vaguely annoyed me about the Oz books is that with the exception of the first book, no one is ever in believabe physical danger--people are enchanted and so forth, and threatened, etc. But no one is hurt and no one dies in Oz. I know that I'm not the first person to feel this way (check out Maguire's WICKED and Ryman's WAS, or two comic books, the now?funct OZ and OZ SQUAD ).

 I like that Harry Potter is contemporary. In C. S. Lewis's and E. Nesbit's books, I understood and enjoyed the fantasy, but I could never quite connect to the details of their daily lives, because they were written more than 50 years ago. Harry lives in my world. It's the same thing that appealed to me in Steven Gould's JUMPER, in which a teenager discovers he can teleport, and uses this ability in
Received on Thu 11 Nov 1999 12:54:36 PM CST