Blog Your Blessing Sunday: Jo March and Harry Potter

When I was a kid, anything Louisa May Alcott wrote and anything written about her could be found in my hand. I loved everything from her instructional novels for children--Little Women, Little Men, Jo's Boys, Rose in Bloom...--to her mercury-induced horror stories, the byproduct of her time as a Civil War nurse.

I shared this passion for these stories with my best friend. These were the books we talked about. We were shy, quiet kids, and this was our bond.

J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series fills that place in my daughter's childhood. She devours the things with her cousins, with whom she acts out the various adventures. They continuously share a feast of the imagination.

The stories are to their readers what sports are to so many men--a common bond that becomes the currency of conversation even among strangers. At a Harry Potter bookstore party on the release of Deathly Hallows, Adella and her cousins were among scores upon scores of strangers who shared the bond of a common knowledge, a common passion, and a common sense of literary adventure. It was magic. It was the power of reading at its very best. It was a blessing.