antipotterium

[jinian]

I do not hate the Harry Potter books, certainly not as much as I expected I would. However, they perpetuate a lot of the things that I find wrong with fantasy: the all-importance of destiny, the irresponsible wish-fulfillment, the People Who Are Bad. A lot of those things are getting better as the series goes on, but HP still isn't the only thing I want to present to kids in the "kid wizards go away to British school" genre. Other similar stuff is necessary, if only to ease the little beggars into reading other forms of fiction.

Hence, I've purchased the Chrestomanci quartet, which fits some particulars, and The Year of the Griffin, which fits more. The Duane Young Wizards books would have been around anyway, since I imprinted hard on those at about ten. Someone, somewhere on the web, must be keeping a list of HP alternatives, and I think I'll go hunt them up, because Wizard's Hall by Jane Yolen was really charming.

I finished it over lunch, so it was quite short, and there was a lot of repetition which would make it good for young kids or a chapter-before-bed book. Mainly I liked that the protagonist had a destiny, but he was clearly not the best wizard everyone had ever seen. He had entirely different talents. It was simple, but in a lot of ways it looked like a deliberate reversal of/answer to HP. I wonder how many other books came first but still address the same themes?

Comments

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Robotic horses are the only explanation!

The Tough Guide is the perfect source material for such a thing. I saw some excerpts from a thing that might be like that when poking around your friends-list, and it looked pretty good to me too.

[kiya]

Yeah; gtst's in the habit of quoting funny bits into gtst journal.

I do like the concept of the mysterious, tall stranger with the strange facial scar riding the black unicorn being the hopeless geek with a stutter. . . .

Wow, that was a lot of modifying phrases.