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| Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times |
| Mari Stein, 14, and her brother, Noah, 9, bought the new Harry Potter book the first possible moment, and each sees something different in it. |
ari Stein bought the new Harry Potter book just after it went on sale at midnight on Friday, and started reading it when she got up the next morning. By 9 o'clock Saturday night she had finished all 870 pages of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix."
Mari, 14, would have finished it sooner but she had to take an hourlong break to weep. That was when she reached the part toward the end, when an important character dies. "I kind of went hysterical," said Mari, who lives in Manhattan and has just completed ninth grade at Bronx High School of Science. "I started crying a lot, so I had to stop before I could calm down."
Mari said she was surprised at her reaction because the word was already out that someone was going to die. "But in the middle I told myself that can't happen because look how happy everyone is here," she said. "So it made the actual scene so much worse, because before that the character had been really, really upbeat."
As both she and Harry Potter have grown older, Mari has had to come to grips with the fact that people — and wizards — don't always behave as they should, and that fate can make mistakes. Still, she convinced herself at the end that J. K. Rowling had left open the possibility, by writing the death scene vaguely, that perhaps the dead character wasn't really dead and would be revived in subsequent books. Mari tried out this theory on a friend, who had also read the book right away. But no luck. "She told me I was in denial," Mari said.
Early reviews from Mari and other speedy younger readers suggest that the series hasn't lost its grip. Reactions to the new book's darker tone, especially among older children, indicate that the Harry Potter stories have become a moving template for their expanding vision of the world, with both its possibilities and its perils.
It's all much simpler for Mari's younger brother, Noah, who ushered in his ninth birthday standing in line at midnight at
Noah said, "That was a little scary to me." But mainly he's happy to be back on the Hogwarts campus, which he finds oddly familiar, and in some ways similar to Public School 11, where he is finishing third grade. "I like the ghosts and I like the teachers," he said. "They are so cool. My science teacher is like that and so is Ms. White, my regular teacher."
This identification with Harry and the other characters and their surroundings has helped create the Potter phenomenon. One mother of 10-year-old twins said her children were eagerly anticipating their 11th birthday because that's how old Harry was when he received the letter inviting him to Hogwarts.
Ming Lin, who is 14 and lives in TriBeCa, said the books had altered the way she saw things. She'd read up to page 540 within the first two days of buying the book. As a teenager who is entering high school next year, she said she appreciated the angst Harry displays. "He seems more agitated and angry," she said. "He's fed up with having to deal with Lord Voldemort."
Samuel Flinn, a 10-year-old from Hoboken, understood Harry's refusal to forgive his friends for failing to write to him over the summer, even after they gave him what Sam considered to be a reasonable explanation. "I think the old Harry would have said, `Oh, it's O.K.,' " Sam said. "I think some of it is part of growing up. And it's also because there's a lot of unfairness."
Fairy tales and myths have always helped children face their fears and frustrations, but Ms. Rowling's meticulous rendering of the wizarding world makes her fantasy realm utterly recognizable.
"I feel these books hold your attention in a way I can't get other books to somehow," said Joanna McClintick, who just graduated from the Dalton School in Manhattan. "There are other books that are much more emotionally rewarding or deeper, but this is a book I can read on the subway, where there's lots going on, and still be really involved. It's not like `The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,' where I'm just blown away by how much of a chord it strikes in me — but it touches that element of desire, where you could wave a wand and have your room be clean."
Joanna, 18, put the book on reserve at Ivy's Books on the Upper West Side several weeks ago. She didn't pick it up until Monday because she'd been on a camping trip with friends and didn't return home until late Sunday evening. First thing on Monday — or almost first thing — she went to pick up her copy. "I had to take a shower, walk the dog, take all my dirty clothes out of my bag and put them in the laundry basket and buy Harry Potter," she said.
With her friend Annie Fox, Joanna went directly from Ivy's to Annie's building, where they sat in the yard out back. "Annie forced me to read it to her out loud 15 minutes after I bought it," Joanna said. Annie didn't have a copy yet, because hers hadn't arrived from Amazon.com. On Tuesday, the girls continued their Potter readalong, this time on the Great Lawn of Central Park.
"I didn't like the beginning because Harry Potter is super teen agsty," Joanna said. "It's annoying. As a teenager I worry that a lot of adults view teens as rude and unable to express their feelings, and I was worried J. K. Rowling was putting Harry Potter in a stereotypical teen light." But as she read further, she saw the author had added elements of humanity that made her feel compassionate toward Harry. "You remember all he's had to go through," Joanna said. "He's the perfect balance of all you wish you could want and what you wouldn't want to have happen to you."
For many children, the sometimes exasperating changes Harry and the narrative undergo in the latest installment underscore their own evolving outlooks.
"When I first started to read the first one, my dad read it to me when I was falling asleep," said Zoe Lutz, 13. "Then I began to read it by myself. Reading them at all different ages makes you feel differently about every one of them because you change as you get older."
Certainly that holds true for 11-year-old Emma Cash, a sixth grader at Setauket Elementary School, on Long Island, who claims to have read each of the Harry Potter books 18 times. "I just can't get enough of these stories," she said.
