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My question is at what point should she slow-down the pace of the HP series due to its content?


I'm writing this fresh from the theater--just saw HP 6 with DD and a couple of friends wink

When DD began reading the books she was about a year older then your DS. She picked up the first book over spring break and finished book 6 by the end of the school year (so I guess maybe 8-9 weeks?). I had already read the series, and I began rapidly re-reading them trying to stay one step ahead of her so that I could decide when she should "take a break". Silly me. I think her head would have exploded if I had interrupted the series!

What I realized as she went through the series was that some of the disturbing/dark aspects of the later books are disturbing because of the parallels we can make to the "real world". For her, with her limited understanding of the social-political world, there were parts that were sad and parts that were scary, but only in the same way that the Wizard of Oz is scary, if you know what I mean. Events were less "disturbing" to her than they were to me, because it was a completely fictionalized world in her reading of it. She has now re-read every book about a million times, and I can tell that there are parts that resonate differently with her now that she is older and has had more experiences.

That said, I recommend that you read them too (or listen on audio). The books were DD's favorite topic of conversation, to the exclusion of almost everything else. She was fascinated by the characters, by the direction of the story, by the choices characters made, etc.

Since few kids her age were reading them, and since many of the kids that were reading them were reading with a relatively superficial comprehension, she needed me to be her conversational partner. If your DS falls for them as hard as my DD, he'll be looking for someone to talk to, and may also find few good conversational partners in his peer group.

Really, some of my favorite memories with my DD will probably always be around her love of HP. When book seven came out later that summer, we dressed up, went to the midnight party, and came home with two copies so that we wouldn't have to fight over the book. We lucked out with her discovery of HP coming when the fervor was so high--it was great fun for her to swap predictions and opinions with her camp counselors at the ripe old age of 7 grin !