See, that's the thing. I want them to be brown, like Ginny's.

Petunia's getting Aunt Lily's eyes.

It's gonna play into Lily's feelings of having to fit into her grandmother's shoes.

Okay, I would guess that green and brown would likely give you brown because I think that green is actually brown with a modifier that makes it lighter. Like a dilution of brown.

but does it say what color Lily Potter's eyes are? Harry's daughter.

Aren't the younger son's eyes noted as being the only ones like Harry's/his mother's of ther the three children?

finally gets off arse, reaches over to bookshelf, checks.

Yep.

"Alone of Harry's three children, Albus had inherited Lily's eyes."

(...may be a paraphrase now, as I've had to retype it. Stoopid connection.)

Awesome.

rubs hands gleefully

I love watching an author in the throes of research. "Can I do this--yes! That fits! Ha!"

I'm rereading Sorcerer's Stone. After the much lighter American edit of the last few books, I'm noticing how many British words were changed in this one. The most obvious (other than Sorcerer's Stone rather than Philosopher's) is that the Weasley kids call their mother "Mom" rather than "Mum." I can understand (though not quite agree with) why they'd change stuff like jumper or lorrie, but why change that?

Heaven forfend that American children be exposed to the knowledge that there's more than one flavour of English!

It does my head in. It's so patronising to the readers, and so determinedly parochial.

Actually, I feel quite violently about all the vocab changes. Frankly, a glossary at the front or back of the book would have done the trick (while helping build their literacy skills through use of this handy device), and the American kids would have encountered exciting new words - all the other English speaking kids around the world manage to grasp the concepts of 'cookie', 'pants', 'truck' etc pretty damn quickly when they're enjoying American pop culture even without said glossary, and I don't think they're smarter than the US kids.

And, hey, they could probably even have coped with learning that the name for the magical alchemist's stone that turned dross into gold was 'The Philosopher's Stone' without it scarring their little minds. (I doubt the word philosopher crops up in UK classrooms or playgrounds any more frequently than it does in the US - and yet somehow the kids manage to cope with the word and add it to their vocabularies. Miraculous.)

bangs head on desk

Yeah, I don't understand the change from Philosopher to Sorcerer at all. As for most of the others, I read a lot of British books as a kid, and while there were sometimes a few words I didn't know, I could either figure them out from context or look it up or just skip it.

The American edits got much lighter as the series went on. Somewhere along the way, the Weasleys started calling their mother Mum instead of Mom. I really see no reason at all for them to have made that change in the first place. In the first book, the thing that Molly knits for all the kids for Christmas is a sweater. In at least the last two, it's a jumper. There was book somewhere in the middle (Goblet of Fire, I think) where it kept switching back and forth, which was rather more confusing. Once it mentioned someone wearing a sweater, I got a very odd image when, practically in the next paragraph, there was an elderly wizard wearing a jumper.

I don't feel badly about the changes because I think they had the intended effect. They established and broadened the American market.

It was all about sales. The Harry Potter franchise could've sold decent Philip Pullman numbers (possibly) without the changes, but catering to the American market was the intent, and then they got lucky on top of that.

As JKR got more power and say, and the series sold itself then the Americanisms were less necessary.

As a writer, I don't want to cede control of the language to anybody. But I don't begrudge a publisher finessing the market to have the biggest publishing phenomenon of my lifetime.

Were the book compromised? Undoubtedly. Certainly its Englishness, its flavor, but not really the narrative. Besides anybody that cared about it that much could've gotten the British edition anyway.

Were the compromises necessary to turn it into a publishing juggernaut? I think they were for the first book to break in the US.