Harry Potter

In honor of my discovery yesterday that Harry Potter is now almost as old as he is in his first book, I'd like to take today and post my thoughts on the Harry Potter phenomenon and what made it work.

First off, and most importantly, there's Rowling's talent. She hit gold with her subject matter, but she also had what it took to capitalize upon it, and there are few people that could have done it so well. She plotted out a seven-book series about kids long after she was no longer a kid herself, and kept it believable and interesting at least through book five (which is, I must admit, as far I've read so far). That's an incredible accomplishment any way you slice it.

Okay, now that acknowledging her talent is over, let's look at why the story was so popular. It seems pretty simple to me, but I haven't seen many people discuss it. Sure, there's the orphaned hero with magic powers, the evil step-parents, the heroic destiny--all the most common tropes of fantasy and (more importantly, I think) fairy tale, but there are plenty of other books that have those and didn't achieve such success, and I'm not willing to pin it all on Rowling's talent. So what do we have that's different?

Boarding school.

I really think it's that simple. Kids love boarding school stories. They've been around forever but they're still huge in YA, which was Potter's target audience, and Rowling managed to put a new spin on hers by combining it with magic powers and doing it very, very, well. So if that's why it was initially successful, why did it remain so?

She matured her books at (or close to) the same rate her audience was maturing.

She did a great job of making her books more adult book by book. Let's look at the scariest things in each book, through book five where my knowledge ends.

Book One: Confrontation with a creepy teacher. Boarding-school mystery story.
Book Two: A giant snake. We've moved on to fairy tale.
Book Three: The Dementors. We're now on the dark end of the fairy tale spectrum.
Book Four: Failure to stop Evil with a capital 'E' (Voldemort) and the death of a child. We're now at the border between darkest fairy tale and modern fantasy.
Book Five: Not any real terrifying moments (death of Potter's godfather, perhaps?) but nervous tension the whole way through. Constant question of whether or not Potter can do what 'his destiny' is and stop Voldemort. We're now solidly away from fairy tale and into modern fantasy, and have moved on to a theme ('Can I do everything people think I can?') more resonant with teenagers than pre-teens.

The books get more and more mature as both Potter and his audience get older and older. I think that's a pretty good primer for how to write YA, because there will come a point when the kids grow out of YA, and if you want to keep them, you've got to grow with them. New readers, the next generation of kids, can always start with book one.