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.

I always read Harry as exceptional--as the most powerful of his peers, even if he's not as smart or as studly.

The key thing for me is that the only reason we ever know that is because he's thrown in situations where he really has to call on his power. Most of his peers aren't, especially in the first few books of the series. By the time it's made explicit that he's got crazy mad power, we've already bought into him as somebody to identify with, and the emotional resonance is already there.

He does show himself time and again to be an exceptional leader, but that's actually a pretty subtle ability for a hero, and not something that throws most out of their vicarious comfort zone.

It's nice too how his popularity at school fluctuates so - I mean, initially we have that whole "OMG I'm seekritly magical and rich and famous!" thing, but then later on he gets his fair share of being demonised and ostracised by wizarding/school society, so the readers don't get too pissed off with him being Mr Popularity - he's still kind of misunderstood emo outsider guy at times. (Thinking of Goblet of Fire now, and finding myself feeling v affectionately towards that book. Pity its editing team forgot to, you know EDIT it - but I do love that whole thing of Cedric being everyone's favourite, and Harry being universally despised. Neat trick, managing to make your boy an underdog even after he's saved the world a few times.

Pity its editing team forgot to, you know EDIT it

I'm that way about Order of the Phoenix. And it may be the one where he's most demonized and ostracized, what with the "Voldy isn't really back" meme.

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.

To me, the most real children in fantasy/magic are Edward Eager's children, who are very ordinary children who survive with their wits. E Nesbit's children are pretty much the same, except their being in Edwardian England made them somewhat exotic to me. I was grateful to Harry Potter for encouraging publishers reprint books like those. Until Harry Potter, Edward Eager had been out of print for years.

I am grateful to Harry Potter regardless. For all that the later ones needed editing, and it seems that most books these days need editing, the Harry Potter books have that rare quality of making you want to turn the page. I loved having so much public hoopla over books. It was like people running up to the pier and asking "Did little Nell die?" when the ships came from England with the next installment of The Old Curiousity Shop.

When one of the Harry Potter books came out, a reporter here interviewed a father who had his daughter and several more preteen girls with him waiting to buy the book at midnight. They were having a sleepover and they were going to read all night together. It was so wonderful that I cried.