User blog comment:JoePlay/Wizarding World Giveaway/@comment-4147608-20110714181252

When I was three years old, my mother began reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone to me. She herself had never been a fanatic, had in fact never read any Harry Potter book besides the first one. To me, that now seems unbelievable. I might not remember very much of my thoughts on the novel at the time, but i do know that it changed my life. From the age of three, (and I am now fourteen years old) I have been hooked, addicted, obsessed with the series. My friends joke whenever I am absent from school that i must have been taken away to rehab for my addiction to the Boy Who Lived. I recently returned from to a summer camp i went to once before. I just loved my counselers, but as they have hundreds of kids every summer, i hardly expected anyone to remember me. However when I returned, everyone from my former counselers and fellow campers to the lady who worked the craft booth remembered me as that One Girl Who Read Harry Potter Like Fifty Times. I don't know about fifty, but, and i swear this is the (rather alarming) truth, i have read every single book anywhere from twenty to thirty times. People I haven't spoken to since second grade tag my in their TagMyPals photos on facebook as the Harry Potter Junkie. Half the kids in my grade vaguely remember me as the girl in fifth grade who sat on the bench and read Harry Potter every recess. And it's true. Harry Potter has gotten me through tough times. When my BFFs in fifth grade left me to become popular, Harry Potter stuck by my side. When sixth grade rolled around, and Middle School hit me like a train on the tracks, and I appropriately became a total trainwreck, all I ever wanted was for the Hogwarts Express to whisk me away. When my parents and I fight, when my best friend isn't speaking to me, when I earned a C on my math test, even, when tears are running down my face for any reason at all, the prescription is the same: all I have to do is curl up with a mug of green tea and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, all I have to do is read about a downtrodden, mistreated, neglected kid who was whisked away to a place of magic where he was admired. A kid who turned from an eager to please child with no sense of his real worth into the Chosen One. Harry Potter is a story of magic, obviously. But it is also a story of friendship. Of courage. Of choosing to do what is right, rather than what is easy. Harry Potter may be considered dorky by much of my age demographic, but to me, it is a tale of a hero that could be me, too.