If you’ve hit the bookstores or libraries lately and pay any sort of attention, you might have noticed—in fact it’s hard to ignore—the huge proliferation of Harry Potter spinoffs, dictionaries, and guides or the mass of Twilight wannabes, gift sets, official guides, movie companions, CDs, and well you get the idea.

What you might not have noticed is the presence of a legitimate Young Adult and Children’s section. After all, it’s been ten years since Harry Potter came out, which for a lot of us is basically our entire life. Can you even remember life before Harry Potter? I will attempt to cast your mind back to this somewhat mythical time. It was a bleak era, I admit. Children’s fiction, Young Adult fiction, and even Adult fiction was hurting. Publishers bemoaned the fact that nobody was reading anymore and continued to push diet books on the demanding public by the millions. Obviously, the public couldn’t have been too satiated, literally or literarily.

Our response to Harry Potter is that of a starving woman combing the cabinet shelves for that one last piece of stale Halloween chocolate. We inhaled Harry Potter. It was that or keep re-reading Are You there God? It’s Me, Margaret and other Judy Blume staples. Did you wince? That was the best we had back then. Authors like Tamora Pierce and Dianna Wynne Jones were even more marginalized in those dark 80s and 90s, when their books lay ignored in the corners of Children’s sections.

Many desperate Gen-Xers decided that books were the one area where their grandparents had it better, and the most dedicated kids found Nancy Drew or the Bobbsey Twins. This surge in interest, brought on by the kind of thirst provoked only by living in a veritable literary desert, is the only reason Hollywood thought that a modern movie version could be attempted for Nancy Drew. Poor Hollywood should have, and maybe could have, capitalized on this mini-furor pre-Harry Potter Era, but, unfortunately for them, they waited, and our generation got what it was silently crying out for, Pottermania.

The legacy of Harry Potter is how it captured our imaginations in a way nothing else had ever come close to. Children, teens, and even adults indulged their underutilized ability to dream in a story about a school everyone would have liked to have gone to, where magic is real, and everywhere one turns there is another adventure; goblins, giants, and, above all, wizards are three-dimensional characters we can relate too, while thrilling to their stories. We find it comforting to dive into a world where right and justice triumph, and the good guy always wins somehow, especially when the real world starts challenging our optimism. HP served as its own defense against a swirling fear and malaise that might have otherwise defined an era.   

We all remember either standing in line at the bookstore at midnight, or talking to someone who did (anyone want to admit to HP bed sheets?), but did you notice that all the cheesy, worn-out Young Adult books from the eighties were being replaced? Pierce and Jones finally got a shelf of their own in the teen section. Fantasy readers might have first encountered Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle sitting under a sign reading “What to read while waiting for the next Harry Potter.”

Bookstores, publishers, and authors were making a killing on HP and used Pottermania to go even further. Old, ignored books were resurrected, and authors, who had been grudgingly printed in abbreviated forms (publishers believed Americans didn’t read), came back with a vengeance. Luckily for readers, they brought their friends with them. Pierce, who toiled for years trying to bring even truncated Young Adult books about strong women to the few starved souls who would read them, was finally vindicated.

Who does she credit for this shift in publishing trends, for the end of an era-long literary dehydration? At the end of the second book of the series all is revealed, the secret unmasked, the cat let out of the bag: “Aly’s story is a pair of books instead of a quartet thanks to J.K. Rowling (I haven’t met her!), who taught adults that American kids will read thicker books, which means I don’t need four books to tell a complete story.” Can you hear the sigh of relief?  

Discussing our next fanatical fad is fun, as Twilight is both a product of this revolution and a remaining catalyst for it. Now that HP is pretty much done, Twilight has taken up the mantle. Who would have thought 25 years ago that teens would be reading and re-reading six-hundred page books? Now, publishers aren’t just willing to consider the idea: they rely on its financial possibilities. Twilight is worth every one of its pages, to readers and publishers alike. Readers want more descriptions of Edward, and publishers dream of all the dollar signs these instant bestsellers procure them.

Pierce has pointed out that in fact a fair amount of books and authors have Rowling to thank for their acceptance by the publishing world. Isabel Allende, Holly Black, and Melissa Marr may owe some shout outs of their own to Rowling. Nancy Drew has stepped aside for characters who embrace the grunge or punk aspects of our culture. Books featuring teens with tattoos and problems with drugs—characters also quite unlike Stephanie Meyer’s Bella and Edward—are now popular. Once the floodgates opened, publishers could do little more than stand back and watch as a generation latched onto an unprecedentedly wide range of characters.

And it isn’t just that more authors are published and books are longer; it’s that no matter how publishers and booksellers label books, such delineations no longer translate into a stratification of quality. Books are visibly improving for the younger segments of the book reading public, for which we have millions of HP and Twilight fans to thank. This resurgence has blurred the lines between what is appropriate for children, teens, and adults. With only age as a policing mechanism for appropriateness (books aren’t labeled PG or R), there has been a good deal of wiggle room, and we’ve finally wiggled so far that adults are reading “children’s books” and the Young Adult Library Services Association (a arrogant acronym that basically means Teen Book Authority) even designates ten “adult books” a year as embraceable by teens (under the auspicious title of the “Alex Awards”). Now, the battle is to stop seeing books like Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go as “adult books that appeal to teens.” The label, almost universally applicable to high school reading lists, seems like the vestige of another generation, a generation that could never quite bring itself to mentally concede Mark Twain and J.D. Salinger to the realm of the child.

As the lines of genre become blurrier, the traditional mold of characters more obsolete, society seems to finally be accepting that childhood and adolescence are not clear-cut categories that allow a young person to smoothly and gently proceed into the real world. This fantasy world is finally gone, replaced with the acknowledgement that American youth can handle reality. Finally, in this era where elementary school students read about would-be child murderers, the upper echelons of the ageocracy have bowed to cultural pressures and printed books that handle the real issues of growing up, even if within a fantastical framework. Many of these new books use fantasy as a framework to deal with details straight from the average young adult’s life. People find it easier to access themes like drugs, abuse, and abandonment in a different setting. Fantasy helps young adults embrace the realities of the twenty-first century without losing hope that the real world could be different. In this day and age, that may be all we can ask for.