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    Natalie, my four year-old niece, wants to be Harry Potter. She's a girl, but she still wants to be Harry Potter. Why? I ask. Because he's a wizard! Don't you know anything? She even came home one day from pre-school with a magic wand she had made (a long twig found in the playground). When I suggested that Hermione Granger was a much more suitable role model for a girl I was met with complete silence (that in itself should be remarkable since the child hasn't shut her mouth since the day she was born). I should know better, really.

    This was not the first time I had encountered Pottermania within my own family. An idyllic summer in Norway with my own uncle and his family was punctuated by warm afternoons/evenings (midnight sun and all) spent in the garden. I brought a blank notebook, and filled it with the pretensions of an unpublished fantasy novelist. What was my Uncle Thor doing? Reading Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix, recently released in a hard-backed tome of Biblical proportions (or at least the size of a good dictionary). What was my Aunt Marit doing in the lawn chair next to him? -reading her own copy of the aforementioned tome. And my cousin Marti?-the same; yes, his own copy. My Cousin Inge? Reading her copy. And books in Norway cost twice what they do here! Periodically someone would cackle with laughter. "Ooh, what page are you on?" the others would ask. It was, frankly, maddening. Eventually I had to go indoors, or traipse off into the nearby woods praying to the gods of my ancestors a troll would kill and eat me. My first weekend home my niece intoned these dreaded words: I want to be Harry Potter when I grow up.

    It is worth mentioning that my niece has never read the Harry Potter books. Nor has she ever had them read to her. Her mouth runs too much for her to sit still for anything but the shortest children's book – she starts making up her own story for the pictures. But Natalie has seen both Harry Potter films. Many, many times. Even though they are scary and disturbing (Because they are scary and disturbing). And probably most of you kind readers have seen them too, unless you are unrepentantly elitist. (If that is the case then you have probably already read the subject of this article and should go look at some of the nicely illustrated short-fiction elsewhere in this magazine.)