That said, there is something structurally novel about them: they're a way to bring back the boarding school story (once wildly popular in England) for an audience that doesn't consist of boarding school students.
The answer to this is probably the same boring answer that so often explains great successes: it wasn't something structurally novel about the Harry Potter books, but simply that Rowling did a great job writing them.
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Also: Randomness. There must be hundreds of novels better than Harry Potter series that never made it big.
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Another big reason is also that it’s a fantasy novel set on top of our own world, just out of view. This makes it easier for readers who wouldn’t normally be into fantasy to get into it and relate. I still remember going to Kings Cross station as a kid for platform nine and 3/4.
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Or the even more boring answer: it wasn't something exceptional about the structure or writing, but an exceptional cascade of publicity happenstance that snowballed into the invincible status of a go-to modern YA read.
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^ this is it. I can remember when I bought the first Harry Potter book from a bookstore when I was probably around 9, and I started reading it in the car. I remember reading about Professor McGonagall the cat and thinking, "Wow, this is really really good"
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Think you would enjoy Chambliss’ study on excellence (1989). The title already gives away the conclusion: The mundanity of excellence. You do small stuff rly well until it becomes a habit and the cumulative effect caused excellence in his subjects (pro swimming athletes)pic.twitter.com/xdsa2vOuWI
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It best captured the hero's journey that underlies all great epics (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, etc). See Joseph Campbell:https://amzn.to/2Nkh8Co
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This. Rowling made books so compelling that seventh-graders read through 600+ page books in a few days. That's no small feat. It's not always the case that the best becomes the most popular, but if Harry Potter isn't an exemplar of this, I don't know what is.
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"Rowling did a great job" = "Rowling did many things unusually well, not just one thing unusually well." As an author that seems much *less* boring to me. Multiple things to stare at and figure out!
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Eg: I have a running question about whether Harry Potter has something in common with Worm that makes both an unusually fertile ground for vast quantities of fanfiction. Example hypothesis: "A big cast of characters with different powers creates a sense of an open world."
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