The Real Magic Of Harry Potter

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Maybe it was sympathy. But maybe it was admiration. "I admire bravery above almost every other characteristic," Rowling told TIME a few months later, when she sat down to talk about the characters she had created. "Bravery is a very glamorous virtue, but I'm talking bravery in all sorts of places." It is, as Rowling attests from the first chapter of the first book, the virtue that cannot be faked: you either walk into the woods full of giant spiders, or you don't. Stand up to bullies, or hide from them. Hang on to hope, or surrender to fear. She addresses children as though they know as much as or more than she does about the things that matter. Kids like the characters she has created, Harry above all, not because he is fantastic but because he is familiar. Rowling, they say, gets everything right, writes as though she knows what it is to be 13 years old and anxious or shocked at discovering what you can actually do if you try. Maybe she finds her way straight into the hearts of children because she never left in the first place.

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 of fat books and dyslexic kids who have never finished a book read Harry Potter not once or twice but a dozen times. Parents report reading levels jumping four grades in two years. They cannot quite believe this gift, that for an entire generation of children, the most powerful entertainment experience of their lives comes not on a screen or a monitor or a disc but on a page.

So many of those children will be tired come Saturday morning, June 21, because on the shortest night of the year, the night when whatever you dream is said to come true, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix goes on sale at one minute past midnight. On that night there will be Potter parties complete with owls and cloaks and butterbeer, and those who can will lobby their parents to let them wear their Potter pjs and sleep in a cupboard under the stairs. Some families have ordered two or three books, to prevent civil war. At 8.5 million copies, this is the largest first printing ever; and at close to 900 pages, the longest children's book there is. It already has the top advance sales in history: it was Amazon.com's best seller two hours after it became available for preordering. And its contents were so secret that a forklift driver was sentenced for stealing pages from a printing plant in Britain and trying to sell them to the Sun for £25,000, or $41,000.