I don't actually think HP or Twilight are successful because of LCD; I think they're successful because they hit an emotional sweet-spot for the target audience, and manage to do that in combination with a story that people find engaging and fun. It's harder than it looks.

I think they're successful because they hit an emotional sweet-spot for the target audience, and manage to do that in combination with a story that people find engaging and fun. It's harder than it looks.

Oh, I see it, and I'm old enough and have enough 1/4 finished novels to be wary of the "Oh, I could do THAT with my panties tied around my fingers" trap. I just can't put my finger on why THESE novels and not THOSE.

I'm trying to think of novels or series that are more worthy (I know, I know; subjective to a degree.) I'm all walloped on painkillers and nothing truly comparitive is coming to mind. I remember loving to an unreasonable degree Guy Gavirel Kay's Fionavar trilogy, but I realize that I had a much more intensive background in Authurian and Celtic mythologies as a teengager and YA that made my enjoyment and understanding of that series go beyond the pratagonists and plot. Same with Susan Cooper's series.

In fact, it might go a bit towards answering my puzzlement; the average reader's enjoyment and wonder towards HP and Twilight might be because of their general (and I am generalizing to the average reader, not being patronizing) lack of in-depth background info and grounding in the world-building and theories about the mythos that went into the series, i.e., magic and vampires.

Ignorance (and I don't mean that in a perjorative sense, rather, in the sense of simple not knowing) can be literary bliss?

Just a quick thought about HP that may or may not be coherent since I'm full of pasta and shrimp and garlic, but I think one of the reasons it took off the way it did, when it did, was that it came along at a time when children's lit was kind of in a downturn (IIRC) and it was whimsical in a way that few books were at that time (lot of "issues" books) and finally, it was that rare children's book that didn't skimp on the language and that had parents reading it as eagerly as kids. It really made reading a family activity in a way it hadn't been in years.

All happening at a time when experts were bemoaning that fact that kids weren't reading and the dearth of "big books" for kids. Not that the first two were "big" in terms of size, but they were more intricate than a lot of what was considered middle grade reading.

Just my (probably not quite with it) .02

I think Harry Potter is popular exactly for what 'suela says. It was an emotional sweet spot. Plus the books are fun. While other "better" books might be more complete or deeper or whatever, they rarely can be categorized as fun.

I am at a loss to explain Twilight beyond wish fulfillment. But they too are fun.

I had dinner last night with a friend who, since I'd seen her, had fallen completely into Twilight. It's a little terrifying, but I did promise to send her links to Cleolinda's recaps. Heh.

I am guessing that Susan Cooper feels very formal to most of the kids reading now. I've only started reading them and they feel old fashion to me.

Harry Potter -- hits the spot because 1) it takes place at school. Which is where kids live , even if they aren't at boarding school 2)What harry and the gang are learning is what helps them shape the world. These kids have some power, if not the all the power.

I really can't think of any other books where kids school and magic are combinded - except the Charlie Bone books.

It also helps that harry grew as his readers grew. The kids that were 7 to 9 when the first book came out were about the same age as Harry in book 7

I totally agree, Erin--I enjoyed Harry Potter, especially the later books as they got more complex, but I remember picking up the first couple and reading them and kinda being like "Um, OK, and?" because they were just not that much more exciting or different or whatever than any number of other YA wizardy books that I'd read in ages past, and I didn't see what the hullaballoo was about. Who knows?

Word. Certainly with the first couple of books, I was VERY indignant on behalf of the fabulous Diana Wynne Jones, who's been writing great fantasy kidlit for 30 years or so, and whose books never seemed to be in bloody print for more than five minutes. My impression was that Scholastic pretty much made a self-fulfilling prophecy - there was a bidding war when the rights were being sold to the States (the first book having not made a particularly big splash in the UK) and somehow it just snowballed, and they ended up paying a HUGE sum for the book rights. At which point the marketing machine got cranked up to eleven, and the rest is history.

I like the books a lot, and find them very engaging, and I admire the way that JKR blends genres and plays around with language. But the Harry Potter phenomenon is wholly disproportionate to the books themselves; however, I do love that a whole generation of people (a couple of generations, even) got caught up in fannishness - especially BOOK fandom - and got to connect with one another through shared love of a nonexistant 'verse. That's fab. (And some of the Wizard Rock music dealing with the release of the final book, and the strange bittersweet sense of everything reaching an end, encapsulates this whole sense of fannishness and inclusiveness and connection rather nicely.)

I remember I was on Martha's Vineyard the summer that the third HP book came out. That one was released in the UK a few weeks before the US release. There's an annual charity auction on the Vineyard, and someone had bought a UK edition and donated it to the auction. I'd heard of Harry Potter before, but just in a sort of "Oh, that's the new popular elementary school book" way. Many of the other people at the auction who didn't have school-age kids had never heard of it. All of the kids at the auction were begging their parents to bid on it. It ended up going for several hundred dollars, IIRC.

The Christmas season after the third HP book came out was when it exploded here in the US. I was working at Waldenbooks, and we went from complete nonrecognition of the name in August to not being able to keep them in stock in October, and it just got worse through December. We got daily shipments of the three books from Monday through Friday, but we'd never know which book(s) would show up that day, so we'd have a tall stack of HPSS, none of HPCoS, and a few HPPoA, and then two days later, the stack heights would change again. The demand was just insane!

I've read and loved an awful lot of YA fantasy, including most of the series mentioned in this thread and a few others that I think are amazing (The Young Wizards series by Diane Duane, most of Tamora Pierce's stuff, and the John Bellairs series that began with "The House with a Clock in its Walls", for example). Not to mention Madeleine L'Engle.

Despite that, however, I've never felt even close to the amount of desire for a sequel as I did for the fourth through seventh HP books. I definitely think it came down to emotional resonance for me - Harry and his friends felt like normal kids in school, despite the magic. Most fantasy, especially Arthurian or Epic fantasy, doesn't quite capture the sense of children enough, partly because they're usually extremely exceptional in one or more ways. Duane's Young Wizards are the only two around. Will and the other youngsters in the Cooper series were constantly interacting with people not In The Know. Pierce's heroines are almost always either hiding a secret (Alanna and Alys) or extremely powerful (the wild mage). Bellair's Lewis is the closest, but, love that series though I do, I always found Lewis sort of pathetic; he certainly wasn't an average person in his school.

Harry, on the other hand, is mostly normal despite his appearances of being exceptional. All of his friends have magic, so that's a wash. He's friends with many people and not so much with many others. He has some success with girls, but is generally sort of middle-of-the-road. He's neither the smartest nor the dumbest, neither the nicest or the meanest, neither the most sensible nor the most insensible. He's really kind of just a good, average kid. Sure, lots of bad and interesting things happen to him, but it's not because of his personality or his place in the Hogwarts social heirarchy; it's external. It makes it much easier to connect with him than many heroes, because it's easy to imagine that we really are just like Harry, and haven't been put in unlucky enough situations to have our heroism come out.

And I'm pretty sure that's why they caught on so hard with me, and probably part of why they caught on so much with so many others.