Get all the details and see other images (including the UK covers with blurbs) at The Leaky Cauldron.
I am certainly looking forward to the release of this book. I bought a “Trust Snape” shirt to wear a few times during the next few months and for when I go to the midnight opening at Barnes & Noble (and probably at the Order of the Phoenix movie opening as well). That random people will understand the shirt’s meaning more clearly than most political slogans I could slap onto a t-shirt is a testament to the cultural significance that this story has.
One of the things that we often forget about the stories that are taking on a mythological significance in contemporary popular culture is that the current generation is mostly used to adapted stories. Anyone born after the original Star Wars trilogy will have been teenagers during the rise of comic-book adaptation films, The Lord of the Rings films, the disappointing return of Star Wars, etc. There are very few big mythic event films and stories that are original. The Matrix came close, but the overblown sequels squelched whatever power it had. When we went to see the Rings films, we did not need to ask “Will Frodo destroy the ring?” We knew. And if we didn’t know, we could read the book or ask someone who had. The big deal was seeing how Jackson could bring the story to life. The same thing with movies like Batman Begins, the Spiderman films, and the X-Men films. And even though the Star Wars prequels were original stories, we knew where everything was headed; the question was, again, “how?”
Not so with Harry Potter. Though I have some sense of where Rowling is going, I have mostly no clue how things are going to end up and I’m not sure what we will be left with at the end of Book 7. Since so much of this series hinges on what we do not know, there is a lot of pressure on her to deliver some pretty amazing revelations–and I don’t doubt she has plenty up her sleeve. But this is the point–we don’t know what will happen next, and there is something genuinely exciting about being here for a story that will be around for our children to read when we decide they’re ready.
The difference between having the significant stories of your childhood/teenage life being mostly retellings of the stories your parents grew up on and having original stories being released as you grow up is, I think, a significant one. J.K. Rowling herself provided, perhaps, the best evidence of this significance:
Q: Of the many things you must have heard people say about Harry Potter, what are some of your favorites?
A: My very favourite was from a twelve-year-old Scottish girl who came to hear me read at the Edinburgh book festival. The event was sold out and the queue for signing at the end was very long. When the girl in question finally reached me she said, ‘I didn’t WANT there to be so many people here, because this is MY book!’ That is exactly how I feel about my favourite books…nobody else has a right to know them, let alone like them!
When your parents give you The Lord of the Rings to read or the original Star Wars movies to watch, it is clear that such stories belonged to someone else at some time and made its way to you because it had some lasting significance. But when you find a book that doesn’t have that aged pedigree, that comes around to you on its own, the connection between you and that story–and your generation and that story–is far stronger. This girl’s connection to these stories is the perfect representation of this phenomenon, embodying the paradox that is at the very foundation of the experience of being told a story–especially these kinds of mythic stories that last through the years: The paradox of experiencing a story–one that is written with no one individual in mind–in a way that feels as though no one else could possibly understand it or enjoy it as personally as you do.
