The Harry Potter books are deliberately designed to have a more "adult" outlook as they go on because Rowling's core audience was, literally, growing into adole

The Harry Potter books are deliberately designed to have a more "adult" outlook as they go on because Rowling's core audience was, literally, growing into adolescence and young adulthood as the books came out. The books were published over ten years. Anyone who read the first one at age nine would be nineteen when the last one came out. Is this strategy blatantly commercial? Maybe. The first rule of being a professional writer (as opposed to a self-published wannabe whose Great Novel is found, posthumously, in a desk drawer) is to write stuff that people want to buy. If that's a sin, most pros would go to hell with happiness, as opposed to remaining stuck in their day jobs. Commercial or not, Rowling's change of tone has a perfectly good literary rationale, because her main characters explicitly grow up as the books go on. The books are told from those characters' point of view. At the beginning, they're kids, and they see the world in a kidlike way. At the end, they're adults, and they see an adult world. The consistent yet evolving sophistication of the point of view is one of the things that makes the writing strong. (For an awesome essay on POV, from a very successful commercial screenwriter: http://www.wordplayer.com/columns/wp41.Point.of.View.html http://www.wordplayer.com/columns/wp41.Point.of.View.html )