The Books of Magic

At some point, while searching for various Harry Potter and Sandman related things on the internet, I came across an old accusation made by a third party that JK Rowling had stolen the idea for Harry Potter from Neil Gaiman. As far as I can tell, she never commented and he completely denied such charges and demanded an apology from the journalist who had run the story. Both were British authors who wrote fantasy. The comparison was bound to be made. But I had read nearly everything written by both authors at this point and the accusation completely threw me.  Once you got past the fantasy genre, their writing was nothing alike!

Okay, so I hadn't (and still haven't) read everything written by Neil Gaiman. I've missed a lot of his comic books and, though it is currently sitting on my bookshelf, I haven't yet found time for The Graveyard Book.

I mention this, because the entire thing came rushing back into my head when I bought The Books of Magic. I mean, check out this cover (image taken from dccomics.com).




That's totally Harry Potter!  Right?  You've got the young boy, dorky glasses, potential for magic, and pet owl.  Definitely the same kid.

Except it's not.  And whoever made the original accusation was either looking to stir up trouble or never cracked open this book.  Probably both.  That boy's name is Timothy Hunter, and that's not an owl; it's a yo-yo.  They have absolutely nothing else in common with each other, in characters, plot, or scope.  Harry Potter is a hero's journey.  An epic tale about life and death, love and loss, good and evil.  The Books of Magic is an initiate's journey.  Tim is introduced to magic and the magical world.  But the reader never learns what he does with this knowledge.  So no more comparisons.  There can be more than one magical, bespectacled boy in the literary world.

Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite authors.  He effortlessly weaves together multiple mythologies.  His stories usually deal with a magical world (or worlds) that exist just beyond the reach of most ordinary humans.  But they can be visited by a select few.  I eat this stuff up.  It's my favorite genre.  The idea that there's a magical world on the fringes of the real world?  That you could get to if only you knew the right words to say or the right path to take?  I wish that were true.  I may have been very heavily influenced by Labyrinth starting at an early age.

The Books of Magic was a great escape into a world where this is true.  Magic is real if you only believe in it.  Good and evil clash in epic battles just beyond the perception of mere mortals.  Faeries are not to be trusted, and names are too powerful to share lightly.  There were also some great cameos by various characters from the Sandman series.  I should probably have expected this, as I believe The Books of Magic is listed as being a one-off of that series.  But I'd forgotten this detail, so seeing Cain and Abel was a nice surprise.

Seriously, if you haven't read the Sandman series, you need to fix that.  Now.

All in all, this was a great book that will only get better on the re-reads.

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