I can't believe it has been 20 years since the first Harry Potter was published! I remember waiting for the first book with breathless anticipation since the books were published in North America one year later than the U.K., so we had one year of hype leading up to the release of the first book. Then my sisters & I stealing the book from one another whenever we had a chance. We each had our own bookmark & tried to remember our page numbers so that we wouldn't lose our respective places. Then, waiting on tenterhooks for the next book, which came out a year later. I kind of feel sad for kids who can read the whole series now because as the characters learned and grew one year at a time, so did the reader.
When I think about it, there wasn't a lot of fantasy available for children and teens at the time. Mostly classics like The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis & the Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper. Having read all these books several times already left me wanting more fantasy to read. The high school I attended had some more fantasy books, but they weren't published specifically for teens. They were adult fantasy books that would appeal to teens.
Harry Potter filled a niche that people didn't even knew needed to be filled. Think about what has been published in children's fantasy since. It is hard to imagine the literary landscape without Philip Pullman's Dark Materials, Rick Riordan's Half-Blood Camp or Holly Black's Blackwell Pages books, but I believe that they would never have been published without Harry Potter to set precedence.
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