I learnt a lot from them and felt attached to them

There was so much about protecting kids from emotions and keeping things censored. We had nothing.'' When J.K.Rowling sat down to write in a flat in Edinburgh as a depressed single mother on welfare, she tapped into the global mindset of a voiceless generation and sang it back to them in a language they understood. Harry may be a wizard but he is also an endearingly normal hero, enduring the same romantic insecurities, friendship pressures and anger issues that any child or adolescent would. At the core of his being is the loneliness of being orphaned at such a young age, of being abused by the sadistic Dursleys and of being misunderstood by all but a handful of folk, most of whom seem to die. ''It is definitely a book about death,'' says Shelley. Rowling, who, like the Bronte sisters, once lived next door to a graveyard, began writing six months before her own mother died of multiple sclerosis. ''Everything deepened and darkened,'' she said in James Runcie's TV documentary, J.K. Rowling: A Year in the Life. ''It seeped into every part of the book.'' She went on to describe her father, from whom she is estranged, as ''frightening''. In Harry Potter, there is no shortage of father figures: Dumbledore, Sirius, Hagrid surround the boy wizard with idealised versions of what he never had. But they weren't just there for Harry: ''Dumbledore was a big role model in my life,'' says Shelley, whose own parents are divorced. ''In a way he was a perfect dad and a mentor. I was actually going through my books the other day and I could still see the little tear marks on the page when he died. It was very hard Rosetta Stone because here was this great father figure and then suddenly he was gone. You don't expect that to happen. It was like losing the figure that you aspired to be, and it was like, 'What do I do now?''' Crombie, who runs the fan group Melbourne Muggles, went into a ''deep grief'' when Dumbledore died in the sixth book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. ''He was like a god, he gave advice and moral lessons and life lessons and he is the person in the book you look up to, and to have him die was so tragic. ''I went to school on Monday after reading it [the book] all weekend and I was five minutes late for class and the teacher said, 'You're late Erica', and I burst into tears and she said, 'Oh, you've been reading Harry Potter'. I cried for so long. They [the characters] felt very real. I learnt a lot from them and felt attached to them. They did have a parental role and they'd teach you a lot of things. You don't just take your moral lessons from your parents; you take them from a lot of adult people in your life.'' While death stalks the pages, love underpins the whole story; namely, how a dead mother's love offers protection against the most evil of evils. The ultimate fantasy of maternal love sustains Harry time and again when he is caught in the grip of Lord Voldemort and his ilk, and that love sees him through to the bitter end. Absent or dead parents are a remarkable feature of children's literature. The Famous Five would surely not have had so many adventures if there had been more parental involvement in their lives, other than mad Uncle Quentin and ineffectual Aunt Fanny. Roald Dahl also liked to kill off the parents or make them truly awful, like the Dursleys. For Shelley, Croft and Vanheusden, the books took off for them when they were on the brink of adolescence; at an age when they were starting to form their own opinions and imagining life outside the family. And they felt the pain of Harry's abandonment, even if they weren't orphans.

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