1. She's demonstrated that "unpleasant" is not the same as "evil" and that "nice" not the same as "good" in a genre all too frequently polarized along those axes.
2. She's strewn words and names throughout her books that bespeak a lifetime of discovering, archiving, and delighting in the oddments of the English language.
3. She's been able to turn a fairly transparent and unpracticed literary style into fiercely readable books because she's humble enough not to weigh it down with forced craft. She's jettisoned ornament and polish for the sake of velocity and whimsy, and it was absolutely the right choice, given both her own native talents and the sort of story she's trying to tell.
4. She's been able to tap into the feverish, pomp-filled, claustrophobic legacy of Public School Stories and siphon away much of the pernicious class-doctrine and sadism of them, while keeping a lot of the stranger subcurrents in place. I think part of why HP has such an intense slash community is due to these echoes of Tom Brown and toast racks and fagging; it's a horrid, delightful atmosphere to work in. Witch Week was my first experience of it; there again, it was co-ed, mixed-class, and dealt with magic, but it had a feel to it that fascinated me as a kid, and I never read anything like it until I picked up Harry Potter in college.
5. She's never apologized for these books. Not for pissing off the fundies, not for affronting the literati, not for the length of her books, not for drawing a disproportional share of the kids' book market, not for her too realistically angsty and hormonal teenaged characters, and not for the death and pain that's coexisted with silliness and adventure in the stories from the beginning.
She's never needed to preach any particular line in these books. She's never needed to use them as a mouthpiece to justify herself. The one thing that's rung clearly from the first page straight through is that she writes these stories and these characters because they matter to her. The shape of the phenomenon would have been so radically different if the timing or pitch had been just a little bit altered. I don't think it was at all inevitable that these books turned into the massive success that they were. But I don't think the books themselves would have changed much if she had been writing for a cult following. They're drawn from their own source. And you can tell.
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Date: 2007-07-17 01:55 pm (UTC)1. She's demonstrated that "unpleasant" is not the same as "evil" and that "nice" not the same as "good" in a genre all too frequently polarized along those axes.
2. She's strewn words and names throughout her books that bespeak a lifetime of discovering, archiving, and delighting in the oddments of the English language.
3. She's been able to turn a fairly transparent and unpracticed literary style into fiercely readable books because she's humble enough not to weigh it down with forced craft. She's jettisoned ornament and polish for the sake of velocity and whimsy, and it was absolutely the right choice, given both her own native talents and the sort of story she's trying to tell.
4. She's been able to tap into the feverish, pomp-filled, claustrophobic legacy of Public School Stories and siphon away much of the pernicious class-doctrine and sadism of them, while keeping a lot of the stranger subcurrents in place. I think part of why HP has such an intense slash community is due to these echoes of Tom Brown and toast racks and fagging; it's a horrid, delightful atmosphere to work in. Witch Week was my first experience of it; there again, it was co-ed, mixed-class, and dealt with magic, but it had a feel to it that fascinated me as a kid, and I never read anything like it until I picked up Harry Potter in college.
5. She's never apologized for these books. Not for pissing off the fundies, not for affronting the literati, not for the length of her books, not for drawing a disproportional share of the kids' book market, not for her too realistically angsty and hormonal teenaged characters, and not for the death and pain that's coexisted with silliness and adventure in the stories from the beginning.
She's never needed to preach any particular line in these books. She's never needed to use them as a mouthpiece to justify herself. The one thing that's rung clearly from the first page straight through is that she writes these stories and these characters because they matter to her. The shape of the phenomenon would have been so radically different if the timing or pitch had been just a little bit altered. I don't think it was at all inevitable that these books turned into the massive success that they were. But I don't think the books themselves would have changed much if she had been writing for a cult following. They're drawn from their own source. And you can tell.