Impressive Article on Harry Potter

Disclaimer: I've read the first two Harry Potter books (1 and 2), started the third and never finished it. Who has time to sit down and read, when you have to work late all the time?

A while ago, my kids had me watch all the Harry Potter movies (1, 2, and 3) after the most recent one came out on DVD.

My kids, though, have read all the books, and Saturday (no, not Friday at midnight) my daughter went down to Barnes & Noble and picked up the latest. "One of the main characters gets killed," she said to me, nearly in a whisper, after she got home. But she didn't know which one yet.

USA Today yesterday had an article, by Carol Memmott (link here), about Harry Potter fans who are suffering grief over the loss of the character who dies in the newest book. What impresses me is how careful Memmott is to conceal the name of the ill-fated character.

Quotes like these have substituted the character's name, so the USA Today article doesn't become one of those awful spoilers that true fans detest:

"I thought (the character) would survive until the seventh and die in the seventh," says Kaitlin Bennett, 13, of Houston. "I'm sure J.K. Rowling had a good reason — and that's going to be a major part of the seventh book."

"(The character) is killed so Harry can fulfill his destiny," says Sean Donovan, 18, of Seal Beach, Calif.

[Melissa Anelli, of the-leaky-cauldron.org, a popular Potter fan Web site], who had an as-yet-unpublished interview with Rowling in Edinburgh over the weekend, says Rowling told her that "the demands of the story and the demands of Harry's hero arc are such that this character needs to be out of the picture."

Good for Carol Memmott and USA Today for preserving the suspense. It allows the book to take its natural course for the readers who have loved Harry Potter's story enough to stay with the series this long. They deserve to have the story unfold in its own time.

"I cried my eyes out when (the character) died," says Chelsea Guy, 13, of Knoxville, Tenn. "There may be a hundred reasons behind it. I just wish it hadn't happened."