A Quiz - Guess the name of this book

[DATo]

See if you can guess the book I am describing. Please read all ten points before going to the bottom of the post for the answer.

1) A young boy (the main character, whose name is in the title of the book) is endowed with special gifts and has a very special and important destiny.

2) When the book opens he is living with a family under unusual circumstances and in this family there is another boy who treats him very badly.

3) He is taken to a special (and very unusual) school to develop his very special (and very unusual) abilities, and at this school other children who also have special attributes and abilities are also enrolled.

4) Another male member in his family's past was also part of this program before the events of the book take place and had a very high achievement record.

5) He thinks of his parents and is very sad until he befriends two other children at the "school" - a boy and a girl.

6) Of the two new friends the girl appears to have a very high aptitude for some of the things taught at the school.

7) Some of the other children at the school are part of a clique and motivated by their leader they mistreat the main character and hold him in disdain and contempt. The main character does not want to be associated with this group.

8) The main character takes part in a competition sanctioned by the school in which two teams of competitors must fly through the air to accomplish a special task. The main character soon becomes a legendary player and is regarded as the best to have ever competed.

9) It is hard to determine if one of the main character's adult overseers is actually a friend or a villain.

10) The adults at the school are aware that the main character is the only hope to defeat an upcoming, evil menace which threatens the world, and they monitor his progress carefully.

Do you think you know the name of this book ?

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The comparisons are enough to make me throw up. The name of the book is Ender's Game and it was written by Orson Scott Card in 1985. Harry Potter And The Sorcerer's Stone, by J.K. Rowling wasn't written till 1997. I can't help but believe that Rowling was "poaching on (Card's) literary preserves", as Carson McCullers once said of Harper Lee.

 

[Meadow337]

Hmm I think though that the plot outlines are vague enough for the publishers not to have said 'but...' and they would check that quite carefully this being the litigious age that it is. And I do think that writers are first and foremost readers and we do think 'oh that's a great idea'' or similar when we read. Obviously if you are not a complete idiot you don't copy, you are merely inspired, or else you could be in big trouble.

 

[Richard Hannay]

This reminds me of a book called "The Secret of Platform 13", by Eva Ibbotson, about a platform in King's Cross Station, London, that leads to a secret magical world.

This book was written in 1994, three years before the original Harry Potter.

My main problem with the Harry Potter series is that people think it is the be-all and end-all of fantasy literature, and that Rowling created the whole magical school concept, when in fact she takes a lot of her material from culture of the past fifty years. People praise her originality, forgetting that the magical coming-of-age school story is nothing new. What infuriates me more is when fans of the series accuse other authors (Pratchett, Gaiman, etc.) of stealing ideas from Rowling when, if anything, it is the other way round.