How is it that J.K. Rowling\'s apparently simple fantasy school stories have so completely won the hearts and heads of child and adult readers all over the world? Is it that an exceptional marketing campaign has bamboozled otherwise cool-headed and cold-hearted critics? Or is it that our era has a deep-seated need for calm and order to help us to cope with new and distant horizons? Or could it be that children yearn for the magical lives of characters that contrast with their own increasingly constrained and protected existence?.