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

[aryky.livejournal.com]

Teaching, as I do, a younger set of students, I have encountered this already. It's quite dismaying as it was so helpful to be able to compare Bellatrix Lestrange and Severus Snape when discussing flat versus round characters (I don't know what Forster would think, but it worked for me!), and suddenly last year it wasn't quite working anymore. As mentioned by rymenhild there is The Hunger Games (but, whatever else one might think of the relative merits of the two texts, THG is significantly more focused and less, well, baggy in a way that makes it less likely that it will be useful to teach any given literary concept one wants to deal with). I'm afraid that coming up it could be Divergent, which put me off enough that, unlike either THG or HP, I was unable to read past the first book.

Man, I still vividly remember when one of my best friends, exactly half a year older than I, turned 11 and I was just so jealous. That having been said, I have to agree with forochel that, as an adult, I'm not convinced I would wish having been an Old One on myself as a kid over and above being a HP-verse witch. It's actually a really difficult choice - going to Hogwarts would have been cool and not ultimately all that scary or threatening, but it wouldn't have added much metaphysical depth to life, and I might have just ended up being disappointed. Being an Old One would have given me Meaning, but it would have made everything so much more difficult and painful. . . .

I realized I didn't really believe in magic when I read High Wizardry at 11 (Dairine, of course, was also 11 when she became a wizard) and got to the part about "beating her fists against the walls of life, knowing that there's more, more," and I realized I'd felt that way my entire life and that there wasn't actually more. Possibly given the choice I'd rather wish my 11-year-old-self to have been a Diane Duane wizard above either of the other options; it seems like the best compromise.