She knows them well, these books. Many times she's read them, listened to them on tape in her bedroom and on long car rides, debated pet theories with her dad.
They are good friends, these books. She is coming of age with them. She was 8 when her father first suggested she might like them; now she is 14, analyzing the characters' actions through older eyes, thinking oh no, you shouldn't have said THAT.
Is it any wonder that for Jackie Schiff, like millions of other readers, the imminent release of the final Harry Potter book is bittersweet?
"I don't think I'll be able to just let it go," said Schiff, who lives in Bowie, a few minutes from the bookstore where she will grasp Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for the first time just after midnight on Saturday. "I'm so eager to find out what happens, but I don't want it to end. ... When I read the Harry Potter books, I'm not sitting in my bedroom or wherever, I'm right there with them."
The series has tapped into something elemental, something cross-cultural and multilingual. Wildly popular, the six already published books have sold more than 325 million copies worldwide in 65 languages. Scholastic Inc., which publishes the American editions, says the first printing of Deathly Hallows is 12 million copies. That's a U.S. record, it says - topping Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth book and previous record-holder, which in turn topped its predecessor, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
The series has spawned movies, video games and a theme park planned to open in Florida in 2009. Academics have written dissertations about it. Even those most tricky of critics - book-averse kids - have fallen under its spell.
Whether it has revolutionized anything, who can say? That's perhaps too much to expect from a book, or even seven of them. But there are stories enough of children asking for other tomes to read while they're waiting for the next Harry Potter, of adults who say their lives have changed by dint of being fans, to suggest that this stretch of time while the series has played out is one that readers will not soon forget.
Experts will probably try to explain author J.K. Rowling's success for years to come. The engaging plot helps - seemingly ordinary boy discovers he's a famous wizard - but there's more going on under the surface.
Characters, for one. Or, rather, for one-hundred-some, because that's how many Rowling has been juggling, creating the bewitching sense of a real world full of people. The good-hearted, the timid, the vapid, the apparently-nice-but-actually-evil, the nasty-but-probably-good - the whole spectrum of human society.
"Everyone knows an Aunt Petunia," noted Hayley Usmar, a 21-year-old from the United Kingdom who has been a Potter fan since age 14. (Petunia Dursley, Harry's disapproving aunt, is a woman to whom appearances matter more than family ties.)
Denise Shaw, an accountant who lives on the outskirts of Houston, appreciates the "ambiguity" of some of the characters. Many adult fans have said that explains the appeal of a series purportedly meant for children.
Snape the ambiguous
There's Severus Snape, spiteful to almost all and yet seemingly risking his life in the fight against the evil Lord Voldemort (until his shocking fall from grace at the end of Half-Blood Prince - and yet he's still ambiguous enough that he might be on the right side after all). There's Draco Malfoy, Harry's school nemesis and a real jerk, who will nevertheless not murder in cold blood despite the tremendous pressure put on him to do so. And there's James Potter, Harry's oft-praised dead father, who appears in a magical memory as little more than a prat and a bully when he was Harry's age.
"Kudos to Rowling, because she's limited by Harry's point of view," said Shaw, 39, a mother of three who's been a long-standing fan (and not because of her kids, who range in age from 3 to 7). "Those characters cannot rely on their own voice to stand out; they have to rely on Harry's filter."
Meanwhile, she said, Harry himself has been noticeably aging as the series progresses, making strides both forward and back, agonizing over crushes, GOING CAPSLOCK IN TEENAGE RAGE, making difficult life decisions. He is not perfect by a long shot. He is human.
In the 10 years since the first book was published in Britain - nine since it was printed in the United States - Rowling's readers have come to care for the witches, wizards, Muggles, ghosts and others peopling her series as if these creations were, actually, real people. Jessie Webb from Australia, who began reading the books seven years ago when she was 14, found Hermione Granger - Harry's clever, studious friend - a comforting role model when she was in high school, a reminder that a class know-it-all can do amazing things and have great friends.
When Rowling's characters die, as several have already, it is like a blow to the gut. Some fans await the seventh book with apprehension because they fear their favorites are doomed. Waterstone's, a British chain of bookstores, said in media reports several months ago that it's planning to have a telephone hotline for readers distraught by the final book.
At Red Canoe Children's Books & Coffee House, an independent store in Baltimore's Lauraville neighborhood, local kids gathered recently to talk about the things they enjoy about the series - and so often it was the characters.
"I really like Hermione," said Phoebe Sandhaus, 9, clutching a Hedwig doll - Hedwig being Harry's owl. "I don't have a reason, I just like her personally. Everything she does."
Wren Cooke, also 9, likes the jokesters Fred and George Weasley. Devin Gillespie, 12, likes the mysterious Regulus Black, a character who is mentioned only a few times and who, as far as we know, has been dead for a generation.
Earnestly, Phoebe added: "I want the series to end so I can see who lives and dies, but I also want it to go on so I can see what happens to the people who live."
It's this desire for the never-ending story that has fed the Harry Potter fan-fiction phenomenon. Thousands upon thousands of fan-written tales have popped up on the Internet, some imagining the outcome of the Voldemort war, some following the teen characters into post-war adulthood, some focusing on secondary players. One site that hosts Potter fan fiction, The Sugar Quill (sugarquill.net), was co-founded by a University of Maryland archivist who lives in Baltimore.
More than character
"We were never able to accommodate as many authors as wanted to post their stories on our site, and that was even with 20 volunteers beta-reading" - the fan term for editing - "and approximately 25 moderators on the forums," said Jennie Levine, 35, the archivist. "I think at present, we've got a couple thousand stories archived. ... For those couple thousand stories, there are over 100,000 reviews."
Characters alone cannot explain this level of fan devotion, let alone the academic interest that has wrought a bevy of Potter-related books. For Lana A. Whited, an English professor in Virginia who edited The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter, a 2002 collection of essays about the series, Rowling's creation is thematically intriguing.
There's the well-trod storyline of the developing hero, of course - "the idea of this man who's approached when he's an adolescent and told he has a special destiny," she said. But woven throughout are other themes. Growing up, in the grand tradition of the bildungsroman. Loyalty in all its various forms. The bumpy path to redemption. Love and death. Race and persecution.
Whited, who's working on another Potter book about that last topic, is fascinated by the ways it wends through the series, echoing real life. As Harry finds out, a depressing number of wizards and witches care whether you're a "pure-blood" who can trace your magical heritage back at least a few generations. Worst of all, in their estimation, are the "Muggle-borns" with no magical relations.
Voldemort is ostensibly on a campaign to "purify" the wizarding world from Muggle influences, up to and including people. "How interesting that he, like Hitler, is not pure-blooded himself," said Whited.
One of the essay writers in Whited's first book argues - and Whited agrees - that the reason the series captivates all ages is that it works on more than one level. For young children, it's a fairy tale. For older readers, it's a mirror, a slightly warped reflection of reality that resonates no matter their country of origin. Bad government, for instance, is a key plot-thread in later Potter books.
But there's no mistaking that it's still escape fantasy, even when magic is in the background.
"Harry and his friends take things in their own hands," Levine said. "They have to go through so much bureaucracy to do things the official way that they kind of get fed up and want to do it their own secret way, and who doesn't want to do that sometimes?"
Added Webb in an email: "I think there's something very reassuring about that sort of escapist fiction in which ordinary people do extraordinary things."
Shaw suspects that Rowling's frequent use of mythology is another reason the books speak to people across the world, despite the series' very British underpinnings. The author draws on old tales for her magical beasts, plants, even characters. Remus Lupin, the werewolf, shares his first name with one of the mythic Roman twins raised by a wolf.
"It gives the reader a sense of familiar," Shaw said. "It adds to the world-building."
Now, as the series nears its long-awaited conclusion, what is most evident to fans is how it has connected people. Strangers, most notably - how else would Levine of Baltimore have come to know Usmar from Britain or Webb from Australia? - but families, too.
Not wanting it to end
Baltimore resident Anebi Adoga, 13, started reading the books four years ago because his aunt gave him one. Eleven-year-old sister Ejuma joined in for the same reason. Then they both encouraged their 9-year-old sister, Mercy, to give it a try, so she jumped on board in March. "I don't want the series to end," said Mercy, who finished all six books and has started reading them again.
For Jackie Schiff, the 14-year-old from Bowie, the books have offered an opportunity for deep discussions with father Conrad about the unresolved mysteries, the craft of writing and - most pressingly - who gets to read Deathly Hallows first.
"We're negotiating this," said Conrad Schiff, chuckling as Jackie grumbled good-naturedly. "What will probably happen is we'll do shifts."
Then it will be over. The waiting, the hypothesizing, the debates about who will survive. For almost half her life, Jackie has had more Potter to look forward to, but Rowling shows no interest in writing sequels or prequels.
"It's going to be like a big chunk is suddenly missing from my social life," Jackie said a bit sadly, contemplating this turning point, this thought of over.
And yet it isn't the right word. Somehow these books are more than the sum of their pages.
Because of Harry Potter, Shaw started writing her own fantasy tales and succeeded in getting short stories published. "I'm an accountant," she said, to underscore how little she expected this fork in the road of life.
Because of Harry Potter, Levine found herself managing a website and volunteers from around the world.
Because of Harry Potter, the Red Canoe bookstore - less than a year old when Half-Blood Prince was released - still exists. "It was that single book sale that kept us open that summer because we were struggling," said Nicole Selhorst, who owns the store with husband Peter and loves the place dearly. "So thank goodness for that."
Usmar, for her part, awaits with glee all the post-series fanfiction she knows will come. She'll be one of those writers.
"Am I mourning? Not at all," she declared in an email. "Because, you see, the end isn't the end, but the beginning of more great adventures."
jamie.smith.hopkins@baltsun.com