Where are the Snowy Owls of Yesteryear?

[steepholm]

In my first Children's Fiction class of the year I always ask the students to talk about a book that was important to them in childhood. This time, for the first time in a dozen years, not one of the 18 mentioned Harry Potter. The HP generation appears to have passed. No one sat a-tremble on the eve of their 11th birthday to see if an owl would bring them the anticipated letter to Hogwarts. (They ought of course have been waiting to discover whether they were an Old One, which is much cooler.)

There was only one mention each of Dahl (The BFG) and Blyton, specifically Malory Towers. Jacqueline Wilson held up well, though, breasting the tape with Percy the Park Keeper.

Comments

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

Blyton with my hero the girl George and the writer of the early http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Drew (who could do anything; ride elephants at the circus and drive fast vehicles plus she treated her fav. suitor in a condescending way) influenced my young life, I've only noticed exactly how much in later years. My father had gotten a whole box full of Barbie novels (yes, they existed and I read them all and am still suffering the collateral damage to be expected...), Blyton and what was then called Kitty (=Nancy) from a female colleague and I so revelled in them after all the heavy Goethe, Hugo and Dostoyevsky stuff of the house and suddenly, for a short moment, was capable of communicating on face level with the other girls *phew* only they didn't get my fascination with George but nevermind the bollocks!

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Somehow I never came across Nancy Drew - as in, never heard of - until much later. Nor the Hardy Boys neither - although I did have a brief but intense fling with the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series, which I imagine may have been similar.