The latest Touchstone magazine has a compelling feature entitled “Jump into Bedtime Stories” about the proliferation of literature for teenagers with very questionable content. (Sorry, the article isn’t available from their magazine online, so if you’re curious, you’ll just have to pick up a copy.) The author, Sharon Dever notes:

This development is not going unnoticed. In a recent article for the New York Times titled “Summer Reading Blues”, Barbara Feinberg laments the displacement of the magical and adventurous in juvenile fiction by grittily realistic “problem novels” in which adolescents are plunged into soul-crushing situations.

Ah, I remember it well. What a disappointment it was to enter the world of juvenile fiction and discover that the standard fare included books that were angst-ridden, whiny and annoying. Gone were the wonderful fantasy worlds of Narnia, the Phantom Toll-booth and the Hundred-Acre Wood, and after trying to like the grotty stories about teenagers dealing with mental illness, drugs and divorce — none of which, thank God, had any relevance to me — I reverted back to my favorites or went for the older classics by Dumas and Dafoe and Melville (pretty much insuring complete nerdiness, but that’s another story).

So what’s a parent to do? Well, these days there’s Harry Potter, of course, but as Elizabeth observed in a comment to Huw, the latest book is very different. Harry isn’t a wide-eyed 10-year-old anymore. He’s a sullen, self-absorbed, irritable 15-year-old who’s short on patience, self-restraint and gratitiude and big on HAVING BURSTS OF TEMPER IN ALL CAPS. You can hardly stand him.

And worse than what happens to Harry in “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” is what happens to the magical, incredible world that Rowling made us love at Hogwarts. The wonders that once amazed and impressed both Harry and the reader are now commonplace and unnoteworthy — moving staircases, talking objects, classes in spells and incantations. Suddenly they’re not just ordinary, they’re often bothersome, annoying and sometimes downright malevolent. Anyone who can read “Phoenix” and find joy or happiness anywhere in it will have to let me know where.

If it sounds like I didn’t like the book, that’s not quite right. I have a feeling, though I don’t know if I’m right, that Rowling is doing something very interesting. She’s not only taking us through Harry’s feelings as his age progresses, but through his world-view. There isn’t really much to suggest to a discerning reader that Hogwarts and the magic world are any less magical than they were, but they turn out to be more subtle, more dangerous and more complicated. Ten-year-old Harry came out of a closet of innocent ignorance into the magnificence of a world that opened up new wonders all around him. Things were better than he ever believed they could be, and he had a place in it all. Gradually, that world has gotten smaller, darker and more truly dangerous, and the evil that has been gathering since the first book is coming closer, taking shape and taking better and better aim at him and at everything else that’s good.

If I’m even right that Rowling is doing this on purpose, is it a good idea? She’s doing a more sophisticated job of what the ‘young adult’ literature is trying for these days — expressing the world as it seems at one of the most confusing and tumultuous times of a person’s life in the interests of … what? Being relevant to readers that age? Reminding old children like me what it was like? Selling more books?

In Rowling’s case, of course, she manages all three. In the case of less-gifted authors than herself — and there are many, many of them — it may just serve to turn off most juvenile readers and drive some of the hardier souls like myself into books quite a bit over their heads. Though I can still name all four musketeers, if you want.