Blog Post 1 - Angela Fuller

Like many of my fellow Hufflepuffs, I began my Harry Potter journey when I was young, around eight or nine years old. While reading the first two books, both for the first time and the countless times after that, the fairytale genre stuck out to me. Being as much of a Disney fanatic as I am a “Potterhead”, I recognized that Harry was a bit like Cinderella: both his parents were dead, he lived with extended family that were rude and unfair to him, and he was introduced to magic, which completely changed his life. He also dreamed about having someone come and save him from the Dursley’s: “When he had been younger, Harry had dreamed and dreamed of some unknown relation coming to take him away, but it had never happened; the Dursley’s were his only family” (Rowling 37). The fairytale convention appealed to both eight-year-old and to nineteen-year-old me, and made reading the series even more familiar to me, as well as even more magical.

Another convention that appealed to me while rereading the books was the bildungsroman, or coming of age. The bildungsroman did not appeal to me until later, after I had read the series many times. I did not realize how important the coming of age convention was to me until the credits started rolling during the very last Harry Potter film. I had grown up alongside of Harry, Ron and Hermione and now all of it was over; both the books and the movies. It was time to grow up. Rereading the first two books has been bittersweet; the books make me think of my childhood and my first time taking this incredible, magical journey. But it also reminds me of having to grow up and putting my childhood behind me as I make my way into the adult world.

*My page number may be off, I only have the UK version of the books