re: #237 Snarknado!

A friend of mine who was teaching middle school at the time the Harry Potter books came out said the same thing about them (I was mentioning that I never understood why they were so celebrated, since there’s so much good fantasy around.)

The Potter books brings fantasy down to a more accessible level for a wider readership. That was the brilliance of the series, because every British kid can identify with learning at a boarding school, even if he or she has never attended one. Rowling combined a very mundane setting — entering form 1 at boarding school — with a well thought out landscape of magic and myth. In a similar fashion, Riordan’s Percy is a troubled high school student, who thinks he’s dyslexic — actually he sees Greek letters just fine — and a missing father, who happens to be Poseidon.

There’s great fantasy, for sure, but some kids (and adults) have trouble relating to the quasi-medieval settings of a lot of fantasy novels.