Kids Are in the Thick of a Book Boom

She reads it during her down time at swim meets, or while she’s waiting for her grandfather to finish work at his office.

Any chance she gets, 9-year-old Chloe Ott delves into her copy of the fourth Harry Potter book, its cover replaced with a well-worn sheet of waxed paper to protect it.

Sticking with a 734-page book might not fit everyone’s image of a generation known for its love of all things instant. But ask Chloe and many other young people and they’ll tell you: long, intricate stories--books, or cartoons with accompanying card and trivia games--are very much in vogue.

“I’d rather read one big book than a lot of tiny ones,” says Chloe, whose room in her Chicago home is filled with books. “As long as it’s a good story,” she adds with a grin.

That sentiment has helped spark a revival of such lengthy fantasy works as J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy--a born-again bestseller that’s being made into a series of movies--and C.S. Lewis’ Narnia chronicles.

It’s also prompted Al Kahn, chairman of 4Kids Entertainment, to follow his introduction of the once wildly popular Pokemon series to this country with “Yu-Gi-Oh.” The Japanese cartoon series revolves around the adventures of Yugi Muto. A game-crazed teenager, he solves “a thousand-year puzzle,” allowing him to transform into a spiky-haired superhero who uses cards--and the characters on them--to fight evil.

It’s set to debut on the Kids WB television network later this month, with card and video games to follow in stores.

Kahn says the series is aimed at children, ages 10 to 14, who grew up on Pokemon. That includes 12-year-old Aaron Abolt, who spent a lot of time in years past learning the Pokemon characters and collecting their cards.

Now Aaron, who first read about Yu-Gi-Oh (pronounced: YOU’-Ghee-Oh) on a translated Japanese Web site, says he’s more than ready for something new--and more complex.

“Something beyond the basic kind of Disney humor,” says Aaron, another Chicagoan who’s already burned through all four J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books.

Experts agree that complexity is part of the appeal.

“It used to be people, especially boys, would get into memorizing things like baseball statistics. Now they’re getting into memorizing all these card games and characters,” says Rebecca Sutherland Borah, a pop culture expert at the University of Cincinnati.

Borah, who has studied the Potter phenomenon, says many of the stories also have sparked an interest in the concept of “a moral code,” which plays a part in such games as Dungeons and Dragons.

“Right up front you have to figure out what your moral outlook is going to be--whether you’ll obey laws, bend them or break them,” she says.

And then there’s the stories’ own special language--say, the game of Quidditch in the Harry Potter books and unusual character names, from Hagrid to Hermione.

“It’s kind of like when instant messaging hit the scene. It’s like these are secret codes,” says Tru Pettigrew, who tracks youth trends for the Boston-based market research firm Triple Dot/Y-Access.

Still, although the stories themselves may be new, some child experts say the fascination with an intriguing tale isn’t.

“It really isn’t any different than the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys phenomenon,” says Dr. Melvin Oatis, a child psychologist and pediatrician at the NYU Child Study Center. “These stories simply allow kids to let their imaginations run wild.”

And that’s a good thing, says Dr. Charles Shubin, a pediatrician and director of the children’s center at Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore, “as long as we don’t commercialize it to the point that kids are simply being molded by what’s current and the latest fad.”

For Chloe, that’s hardly the issue. She says she was into the world of Harry Potter and the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry long before it was cool.

And while she’s looking forward to the much-touted Harry Potter movie, due out in November, she’s even more eager for Rowling to finish the fifth Potter book.

“It’s like a dream,” she says when asked what she likes most about the story. “I can dream that I’m in the book.”