I know it sounds crazy, but I half-miss Harry Potter.

For close to two years, Harry invaded our lives. Our family – my husband, twin daughters and I – gathered on the sofa every night, often nestled under a down quilt, taking turns reading the bewitching tale of the young orphan who grew to adulthood before our eyes.

When we first meet Harry, he is 10 and living a half-life with his Aunt Petunia, Uncle Vernon and Cousin Dudley. On his 11^th birthday, everything changes.  The gentle half-giant Hagrid rescues him from his hopelessly self-centered and bigoted relatives and whisks him off to Hogwarts, a wondrous school of magic and mayhem.

My daughters were 7 at the time we first met Harry Potter and each night, we followed his and his friends’ antics as they fought evil, learned magic, thwarted teachers, pulled pranks, fell in love and aged far more rapidly than my own daughters, thankfully.

We finished the final Harry Potter installment early this year.  I, for one, was half-glad to be through reading the books.  The first book started as a lively romp down some of the most clever and imaginative roads in children’s literature.

As the series progressed, the books became increasingly dark and brooding…a literary reflection of the trip from the carefree childhood years, through puberty and into an adult world.

Harry Potter and his friends aged and grew more adept at wielding magic, using it to control and rearrange the elements of their lives.  Yet they discovered there were some events over which even they had no control.  Their sole power lay in how they reacted to those events, in mirror image of real life.

I admit to being disappointed in the ending.  I grew up on a diet of Disney where, in spite of every trial and tribulation, I could expect a happy ending.  Somewhere deep inside, I knew the ending was fiction, yet I could believe.

Yes, it’s fantasy, but the “happy ending” of the Harry Potter series was far less believable for me than Disney’s—too much contrast between seven books of somber then one chapter of pastel.  In the final book—much of which felt like the kiss of death from an ominous Dementor because of its epic tragedy—Ms. Rowling undoubtedly felt she needed to leave her readers with a final note of magic. Not doubt, I’d have done the same.

Six months after finishing the last book, I find that I do not miss the tortuous plot and dark underpinnings, but I do miss many of Ms. Rowling’s lively and lovable characters who spun their magic through our lives for two years.

Should I ever have the opportunity to meet Ms. Rowling, I’d congratulate her.  She deserves every bit of success for the tales she spun, putting non-readers under the spell of literacy and turning them into lifelong readers.  That is a feat worthy even of Harry Potter.