by Eva Maler

Created on: October 04, 2009   Last Updated: October 05, 2009

Do you remember what it was like to be 10 years old? What books you loved? What stories captured your imagination? Whether your answer involved Grimm's fairy-tales, The Lord of the Rings, or Narnia - chances are magic and a very graphic struggle between "good" and "evil" featured. And this is the only way it should be, because from a certain age children will simply stop reading, if all that is on offer is the happy, harmonious world of Thomas the Tank Engine.

Not a word against Thomas. He is aimed at children of up to five years old though. Parents of our decade seem to forget that at some point their beloved child has to learn to make judgments, face and cope with the real world. And just like the real world is not, child and youth literature must not turn a blind eye to the existence of good and evil, life and death.

In my mind one of the reasons why the Harry Potter books are so incredibly successful originates in the fact that JK Rowling can extract the beautiful and the brutal sides of ordinary life - love and friendship, death and evil - from ordinary life and put them into an amazing, magical background. This is the secret of Harry Potter - Harry is a wizard, a hero, a celebrity but above all he is an ordinary boy.

Now, why should a 10-year old child be exposed to all that cruelty? After all Harry's Parents didn't die from a road accident but were killed, killed by the most evil wizard who ever lived, Lord Voldemort. And mind you, all those scary creatures were-wolves, vampires, trolls and dementors will give the little ones nightmares. True, horrific things happen in the series. Message: people die in the real world and in books and sometimes very small children have to come to terms with the fact that a friend, a grandparent or even a parent dies.

And what about all those scary, magic creatures? Firstly a lot of the scary creatures are not so scary after you take a close look: Hagrid, the half-giant, is one of Harry's best friends. Remus Lupin, the were-wolf, is according to one of Harry's class mates "the best teacher we ever had". If nothing else, Hagrid and Lupin are valuable lessons for children to not judge a book by it's cover.

And the real really scary monsters? Bad magic, monsters have always featured in children's and youth story. The wicked witch from Hansel and Gretel keeps the two of them prisoner, keeps Hansel in a cage to cook and eat him and at the time she keeps Gretel a slave around the house. In "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" the Queen of Hearts threatens to chop everyone's head off. Harmless? Certainly not. But both stories are classics of children's literature.

Rowling, by the way, has made a brilliant reply to the advocates of "cuddly" youth literature in her book, "The Tales of Beedle The Bard": A revised version of the "gruesome" wizard's story "The Wizard and the Hopping Pot" closes as follows: "And Wee Willykins kissed and huggled the hoppitty pot and promised always to help the dollies and never to be an old grumpy-wumpkins again." Albus Dumbledore then comments that the tale "has met the same response from generations of wizarding children: uncontrollable retching, followed by an immediate demand to have the book taken from them and mashed into pulp."*

Morale of the story: We should put a lot more faith in our children's ability to cope with harsh reality; it will be for their own good in the long run.

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