Opinion | Harry Potter and the Poorly-Read Exorcists

Because that’s what it’s truly about: love. The best children’s literature isn’t an attempt to teach children anything, good or bad. Children don’t read Harry Potter to learn incantations. They read Harry Potter because the stories are absorbing — intricate and exciting and funny — and because reading them makes real life seem more magical. All the children I know went to sleep the night before their 11th birthday half convinced an owl would arrive after midnight, swoop in their bedroom window, and drop an invitation to Hogwarts on their bed.

The gift of brilliant fiction, for children and adults, is the way it blurs the line between what has happened and what can happen. When a book comes to life in a reader’s imagination, the reader is changed, and so the fictional world enters the world of reality in a profound alchemical reaction that changes the nature of reality itself, though not in the way Father Rehill imagines. Because people who read fiction consistently score higher on tests that measure empathy and altruism than those who don’t, it’s no huge leap to believe that Harry Potter has made the world a better place.

Parents and religious leaders will no doubt continue to try to keep “objectionable” books out of libraries, but they will be no more successful at keeping children from reading those books than they have ever been. I was a high-school senior, and my sister was in 6th grade when our mother found a copy of Judy Blume’s “Forever” in our shared bedroom. Ms. Blume’s books are frequently challenged, and “Forever” was no exception, featuring a teen protagonist who has sex for the first time. On purpose. With forethought and birth control.

My parents never made any attempt to censor my own reading, but the outcry over “Forever” must have gotten to Mom. Lori was too young, she thought, for a book with a sexually active heroine, and she asked me to downplay its appeal: “She won’t listen to me, but she’ll listen to you,” she told me.

Later that morning, I picked up the well-thumbed book, one my sister had borrowed from a friend. “I heard this isn’t a very good book,” I said without much conviction.

“It’s a great book,” my sister said. “I’ve already read it twice.”

Margaret Renkl is a contributing opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South. She is the author of the book “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss.”

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