I've been thinking about this essay ever since we got the prompt and I am still not entirely sure what exactly I am going to write about, but like many others, I am going to write about the Harry Potter series. I’m not choosing it because it’s popular or because I particularly relate to the characters, but mostly because of the effect it had on me. I don’t remember exactly when I started reading it, but based on who I was friends with at the time, I’m guessing it was around age 6. I remember playing with my friends and having them say something around the lines of “Let’s play Harry Potter!” and me being like “What is that?” as I had never heard of it before. But I pretended like I knew what I was doing and went along with it. In the beginning, I wasn’t really at that reading level yet, but after a while of my dad reading to me at a pace of a couple pages every few nights, I believed he was going too slow, and took the book to read myself. And that is when my obsession started. As basically the first book I ever read, it became the book to compare all others to, and to this day, the inner child in me argues that nothing will live up to it.
To recap the storyline, young orphan Harry Potter finds out he is a wizard and that he is destined to vanquish Voldemort AKA You-Know-Who, He Who Must Not Be Named, and the Dark Lord. He collects his wand, robes, and trusty owl Hedwig before heading off to Hogwarts. There he meets his new best friends Ron and Hermione and gets into various forms of trouble before saving the day year after year. One thing that drew me into this story was the main characters. I tolerated Ron who was mostly just comic relief and someone to serve as Harry’s best guy friend, I was impressed with Hermione who was seriously smart and the number of times she saved Harry’s and Ron’s lives, and then there’s Harry. The guy that had no clue what he was doing but always managed to come up with something. But what drew me in the most to this story was the call to adventure. What Harry Potter provided for me was a chance to dive into another world and escape from more the boring monotonous life of kindergarten. When I was that age, it also served as a hope for the future: that something exciting could always happen; that one day I would get my acceptance letter and go off to Hogwarts.
