{"id":167,"date":"2011-07-15T13:20:26","date_gmt":"2011-07-15T17:20:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kathleenferrari.com\/?p=167"},"modified":"2011-07-15T13:20:26","modified_gmt":"2011-07-15T17:20:26","slug":"why-i-love-harry-potter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kathleenferrari.com\/?p=167","title":{"rendered":"Why I love Harry Potter"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>\u201cI\u2019ve been writing since I was six. It is a compulsion, so I can\u2019t really say where the drive comes from; I\u2019ve always had it. My breakthrough with the first book came through persistence, because a lot of publishers turned it down.\u201d \u2500 J.K. Rowling<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows \u2500 Part 2 is now in the theaters. I probably will not go see it. I have watched two of the movies on HBO and didn\u2019t really like them. But I did sit in the parking lot of Barnes and Noble for five hours on July 21, 2007 waiting for the doors to open at midnight so that I could buy the book. What I remember best about that experience was how nice everyone was. The crowd ran the gamut of Potter fans: families sitting on blankets with sleeping babies, tweens dressed like their favorite Potter characters, teens who had decided that this was cool and adults like me, who just loved the books. Midnight came, the doors opened, and we walked into the store divided by the sections we were lined up in, and bought the book or books.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0My sister-in-law, Marian, introduced me to Harry Potter telling me, \u201cYou have to read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer\u2019s Stone.\u201d It is a rare book that is recommended to me that I don\u2019t at least look at. Of course, I bought the book, read it, and then joined the ever-growing number of fans who then spent the next ten years waiting for the next six books to come out.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0J.K. Rowling can be admired for many reasons. She followed her passion and triumphed over adversity, and in doing so, she instilled a love of reading, and being read to, in a generation of children who preferred their entertainment to be animated. But, I think her greatest achievement is that she gave us Harry and his friends and set them in a motion in a world that was magical in more ways than one, and because, now, like Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Scout Finch and Dill Harris, they will always be with us.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0As a writer, I am in awe of what Rowling has done with her characters\u2019 voices, growing them authentically from childhood to adulthood, and then reminding us in the end, through the voices of Harry and Ron\u2019s children, that she hasn\u2019t forgotten how to do it.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0I know that you might not agree with me, but from my perspective as a writer, the most complicated and evolved character is Severus Snape. I won\u2019t say more in case you haven\u2019t read the books, but Rowling does a brilliant job of showing you and not telling you why Severus is the man he is.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0If you haven\u2019t read the Harry Potter series, give yourself a treat for the rest of the summer and do so. I think I will \u2500 again!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cI\u2019ve been writing since I was six. It is a compulsion, so I can\u2019t really say where the drive comes from; I\u2019ve always had it. My breakthrough with the first book came through persistence, because a lot of publishers turned it down.\u201d \u2500 J.K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows \u2500 Part 2 is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathleenferrari.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathleenferrari.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathleenferrari.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathleenferrari.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathleenferrari.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=167"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathleenferrari.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":169,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathleenferrari.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions\/169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathleenferrari.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathleenferrari.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathleenferrari.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}