Blog #5 Quarter 2

I am continuing to read the book Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and today I wanted to post about how, even though this book is about magic and magicians, it's not as popular as other books about magic, such as Harry Potter for example because of the author's (Susana Clark) choice in characters. In Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling writes about a young orphan boy who grows up against major odds against him to be the savior of the wizarding world. Some aspects of this book are similar such as the idea of magic and the fact that Mr. Norrell "saves" the magic world by bringing back magic to it (still no sign of Jonathan Strange yet), but others are very different which is what I think sets this book apart from the more popular books, like Harry Potter. First of all the main character in Harry Potter is a boy who eventually grows into a teen and he is full of bravery and adventure. I think that this is where Susana Clark went wrong, so far at least, the main characters appear to be stuffy, old philosophical types of guys and that really isn't very fun for teenagers (the intended audience) to read about and they're also not very adventurous. So where can the fun in the book be with this type of character? I also don't think that Clark put her main characters against enough obstacles (so far at least) because they aren't orphans or abused like Harry Potter is, they are well off rich men, that have everything going for them except maybe age.