Word: magical
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...werewolf professor Lupin was one of her favorite characters, and about some new creatures who would be making their debut. "This is all TOP SECRET," she warned, so Catie could tell her family but nobody else, "or you'll be getting an owl from the Ministry of Magic for giving our secrets away to Muggles." It was signed, "With Lots of Love, J.K. Rowling (Jo to anybody in Gryffindor...
That is at least a place to start in trying to understand why Rowling's books are the most popular children's series ever written. It is hard not to believe in magic when you consider what she has done. Through her books, she speaks to kids in Milan and Morocco and Minnesota, and those conversations too are somehow private, even though they are conducted in 200 countries, in 55 languages, in Braille, in 200 million volumes. Children buy her books with their own money. They wear out flashlights reading them after lights-out. Kids with a fear...
...leave the room every time the teacher read aloud from Harry Potter. But even that ruckus has calmed down or come to stand for a much larger conversation about what should shape the moral life of children. "I think any unusual focus on things like magic and witchcraft is a bad idea," says Charles J. Chaput, Archbishop of Denver, "but these things can also be a natural part of storytelling with children. So I think the Potter argument is really about bigger and deeper battles going on all over the culture about our national character...
...Books; 211 pages) and an entertaining look at Orwell's second wife Sonia, The Girl from the Fiction Department by Hilary Spurling (Penguin; 208 pages). These additions to the mountain of Orwelliana provide new intelligence on one of literature's most puzzling figures. Like the time he used black magic to kill somebody. In a minor literary scoop, Bowker reports that the teenaged Eric Blair made a wax effigy of a hated fellow student at Eton, contemplated sticking pins in it but settled for tearing off a leg. The victim, an older boy named Philip Yorke, promptly suffered a broken...
Quaintly illustrated, but with plenty of modern childhood trauma, The Spiderwick Chronicles (Simon & Schuster) are aimed at kids too young for Lemony. Authors Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi even make like Snicket creator Daniel Handler on book tours, playing coy about authorship. Sales magic seems to be afoot, at least; The Field Guide and The Seeing Stone, the first two volumes of the Chronicles, hit the New York Times children's best-seller list the week of their release...