PS/SS 16 & 17 - shipping - kidlit - Divination - ADMIN re: OT

[Amy Z]

No: HPFGUIDX 29524

katzefan wrote two terrific summaries including:

> 5) At the end of the chapter, did you have any inkling who would
> be waiting for Harry?

Nope.

> 6) Were you disappointed with Harry when he said he intends to
> 'have a lot of fun with Dudley this summer' because the Dursleys
> don't know he can't use magic over the holidays? Or did you have
> a sneaking sympathy with Harry's new ability to 'get back' at
> Dudley for some of the misery Dudley caused him?

I think it would have bothered me more if I thought Harry really 
succeeded in scaring Dudley, or worse, actually cursed him somehow.  
But I'd already read CoS, so I knew it didn't last beyond a few 
obviously ineffective "jiggery pokery!"s.  Petunia knows Harry isn't 
really cursing Dudley, so even though she's afraid of him herself, 
she's probably told Dudley a dozen times to ignore him, and Dudley's 
just too stupid to stop screaming.

Joshua wrote:

>But who is Ron's Miss Wrong? 

Clever JKR:  Ron-shippers of all stripes can be satisfied with this 
statement, because Ron falls for two people.  At least one of them, 
therefore, is Miss Wrong, and she evades the R/H question altogether.

epoch2 wrote:

> I wonder how a woman writer can know what it really feels like to be
> an adolescent boy in the midst of his first crush.

Adolescent boys and girls must not be that different.  I knew exactly 
how Harry felt and I've never been an adolescent boy in my life.

Cindy C. wrote:

> Is there "good" adult fiction in which children are the protagonist?

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce), which I'm just 
rereading, but childhood is only a fraction of the book and it can be 
read as autobiography.  Pullman's His Dark Materials does not belong 
on the children's shelf, IMO, although I know an 8-year-old who 
enjoyed it.  I've never read The Tin Drum (Grass) but it's about a 
child, no?  Lord of the Flies, A High Wind in Jamaica, Oliver Twist, 
David Copperfield--but all in all, very few books come to mind.  With 
deference to Heather, most of the books on that list get pegged as 
"young adult."  Who reads Catcher in the Rye or A Separate Peace after 
American Lit class?

If we really took children seriously, we'd accept them as the 
protagonists of adult fiction.  Maybe most people just like to read 
about people who look like themselves.  And, a la Pullman, if we took 
stories seriously we wouldn't fuss about who the protagonists are 
(thanks for the great link, Luke!).

David wrote:

>They just aren't that dark.

I dunno, that graveyard scene is pretty grim, and all the more dark 
because it's a 14-year-old boy, not an adult, who's being tied up and 
bled and threatened with murder.

Penny quoted Caius:

> "I've skimmed through several volumes of Grisham and Cornwall in
> search of a semi-colon. I've yet to find one.

JKR may be way ahead of Grisham and Cornwall (I've never read them or 
even skimmed them in search of a semicolon), but her sentence 
structure isn't *that* complex.  Her writing is excellent--I was so 
pleased when even my writer dh pronounced PS, the most child-oriented 
of the lot, well-written--but there are so-called children's books 
with way more semicolons.  (This sounds like some kind of bizarre 
award system.  "The Times says:  Five semicolons for The Subtle 
Knife!")

Ev vy wrote re: Harry and Ron not getting caught making up Divination 
homework:

> The point
> here is that both Harry and Ron are at least that intelligent (or 
Trelawney
> that stupid) that they manage to come up with something which is 
untrue but
> plausible.

And that Divination, at least the way Trelawney practices it, is 
largely lucky guesswork anyway, with a heavy slant towards deadly 
disaster, of course.  Harry and Ron are tuned into her wavelength all 
too well.

Amy Z

ADMIN Postscript:  Please do not respond onlist to the scarf 
information request.  I have removed it from webview and encouraged 
the poster to send it to OT-chatter, where it belongs.  The college 
thread is also offtopic.  Thanks!        --for the Magical Mod Squad

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   "Dumbledore, you know what that woman =is=?"
   "I consider her to be a very able Headmistress--
 and an excellent dancer," said Dumbledore quietly.
                       -HP and the Goblet of Fire
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