(notice it is a Catholic family guide...very nuanced in what she says--it would be wrong to characterize it as pro or con)...in which she deals with all the issue. Now the very orthodox Catholic priest, Father Z gives his take on it:I will say, however, that this book is all about finding one’s way through loss, trying to find identity and peace when life has been so truncated at its very start. The loss of Harry’s parents while so young deals a profound wound which does not heal in him. He always looking for his father in father figures in the whole series and everyone of them is stripped away from him with violence. He finds surrogates and redemptive figures all along the way. He has close friends and even an adoptive family who shares his pains but only in part. He is always very much alone. The bildungsroman is always going to be popular, but with the fracturing of families today, the confusion and wounds and the never-healing loneliness many young people have grown up with over the last decades, I understand how these books have met with such success.
Rowlings has tapped a dark and bloody vein in our post-Christian psyche.
