It opens at the close

By Emily Nichol     8/20/11 7:00pm

The summer after I turned eight, my father handed me a paperback book during a routine weekend trip to the beach. I flat out rejected it — Why would I, an eight year old girl who loved floral dresses and ballet, want to read a book with a boy on the cover? Not put out by his already angsty daughter's stubbornness, my father decided to begin to read the story out loud along with my little brother, who was then starting first grade and who happened to be sharing a room with me. The next day, my father found that I had sneaked the book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, from my brother's bedside and claimed the novel as my own, as would countless other children throughout the world over the next 12, and hopefully more, years. This July, along with a record-breaking number of other viewers, I eased into a plush theater seat and braced myself for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, wondering if this film marked the end of an era or the beginning of a new tradition of entertainment.

Contrasting with part one, part two was more quickly paced and adventure-packed, rendering every moment with the potential to drag with more tension and action than ever. However, it did seem equally as truthful to the seventh book as its sister film. While an adaptation from a book is never perfect and is bound to offend some rogue viewers (admittedly, I have a short list of what I count to be egregious errors), the film's discrepancies were obvious choices to keep the timing down when it needed to be.

Particularly striking was each actor's growth, especially since Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. The students who remained at Hogwarts, notably Neville Longbottom (Matthew Lewis), Ginny Weasley (Bonnie Wright) and Luna Lovegood (Evanna Lynch), endowed their characters with a gravitas that is rare in such a commercial film, and even rarer in such young performers. Even Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) was able to round out his usually despicable character with a touch of sympathy. Every cloak's rustle and spell's flash felt like a surprise thanks to David Yates' meticulous direction, and his nod to the first two Harry Potter films by recycling bits of John Williams' score was wonderful. But as the credits rolled and the tissues emerged, an emptiness settled into the theater as we viewers asked ourselves: What next?

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Really, the greatest thing about Harry Potter was its ability to appeal to readers at any age. Our wizarding teen counterparts taught us to love being immersed in their magical world, whether via movies, videogames or the original novels. Even though Harry's journey is over, it is hard to view it as a tragedy. Books like Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games, both originally young adult novels, are being adapted into films to be released later this year and early next year, respectively.

The former book, whose film is titled Hugo and is being directed by the venerable Martin Scorsese (Raging Bull), uses text and illustrations (although it is by no means a picture book) to tell the story of Hugo, an orphan boy who lives secretly in a Paris train station and gets caught up in a magical world subtly evocative of Harry's.

The Hunger Games, already a bestseller on adult fiction lists, introduces Katniss Everdeen, a sixteen-year-old girl who lives in dystopic Panem and secretly hunts to feed her family in an undernourished society. When Katniss' twelve-year-old sister is chosen in a lottery to fight with 23 other kids to the death in a live-televised event, Katniss volunteers, leaving the life she knows forever. The Hunger Games is the first novel (young adult or adult) that has absorbed my interest so completely since Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and is the first novel that really challenges Harry Potter in its popularity and integrity as a story. Its adaptation is being directed by Gary Ross (Seabiscuit).

While I am awaiting my invitation to Pottermore.com, the emergent website that will house the series' e-books as well as interactive material and additional content, I know the site was not designed with aging Potter fans in mind. It was developed for new readers for the series, to keep the next generation of internet kids as enthralled in the series as we were growing up with the exciting release of the films. There will never be another Harry Potter, but its closure is certainly not the last of wildly successful young adult books that can captivate adults. Rather than mourning the terminus of the series that accompanied so many of our childhoods, keep reading and watching for the next series to take the Young Adult genre by storm. There are definitely great things to look forward to: "words are," as Albus Dumbledore said, "our most inexhaustable source of magic."

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