I am a part of the Harry Potter generation. Great, now that we’ve got that out of the way, we can move forward.

Growing up all I ever read was Harry Potter. Imagine a scrawny five year old with her nose stuffed in a book thicker than her wrist. That was me all the time. Although there were many words that I couldn’t understand like defile, and desiccate, Harry Potter sparked my passion for reading.

Entering a world so entirely different from my own was a great escape from the horrors of discrimination that I so often faced in the real world. Being a coloured kid in a predominantly white neighbourhood made me stand out, and any chance to evade the constant taunts was always welcome.

Exploring this new, magnificent world through the eyes of a misfit like myself made growing up enjoyable. Repeating these stories made me a classroom celebrity and the suddenly the color of my skin didn’t matter anymore. Eventually I started to make friends and fit in, particularly with my peers whose love for Harry Potter matched my own. For the first time I felt like I was a part of something, all thanks to Potter.
Over the years, I’ve found that people who aren’t part of our fandom often dismiss J.K Rowling’s masterpiece as lunacy. However, I’ve learned more about life from these books than I have anywhere else. Rowling’s carefully constructed novels instilled many virtues among her readers like acceptance, bravery, compassion, and diligence.

These descriptively written books are far more than simple fantasies with mythical beasts and hard-to-pronounce incantations. With her books filled to the brim with lessons, J.K Rowling does a phenomenal job outlining prevalent issues in our society. Through her novels she repeatedly highlights the consequences of discrimination, the importance of friendship and teamwork, and the power of choice.
However, the one lesson that always stuck out to me was to never judge a book by its cover. Throughout the series everyone believed Snape, the hostile potions master, to be ‘the bad guy’. His dark demeanour and cold nature, made him seem villainous. However, near the end we learned he always had Harry’s best interests at heart. Somewhat similarly, the reader initially thought the perky, preppy and perpetually pink, Professor Umbridge was a kind mentor but turned out to be cold, cruel and evil.

If you didn’t quite catch that parallel, Rowling made things even simpler and provided a literal example. In the sixth novel, Harry and Ron fight over an in-pristine-condition textbook instead of its ripped and torn twin, not realizing the latter was a goldmine of information, with useful nuggets of knowledge crammed into every margin.

Even beyond the meaningful morals woven into her stories, Rowling betters the books by creating characters we can relate to: the misfits we identify with, the seemingly cruel teachers who just want an excuse to fail you, or even the friends who are at our beck and call in times of need. In doing so Rowling constructs a world much like our own in order to help us better understand ourselves and each other.

With a plethora of hidden truths, Harry Potter is undoubtedly among the most influential stories of our generation. Her writing definitely changed the life one particular scrawny kindergartner. As for those who scoff at the mention of our beloved characters and our references to the novels that shaped our world, take a leaf out of J.K Rowling’s work and don’t judge a book by its cover.