They have more money and less direction than their parents. They colonise shopping centres in major urban centres at the weekends with a confidence that is often brash and unsettling.

Last Friday night they gathered in their Ugg boots and designer t-shirts with make-up and dramatic fashions . . . only this time it wasn't for a concert or a disco or to drink underage.

At a minute past midnight yesterday morning JK Rowling's final Harry Potter book was released. The anticipation was palpable as child after child, aged from seven to 17 and even older, queued for hours and then emerged from bookshops countrywide clutching a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. In the space of seven novels Rowling has reclaimed the excitement of childhood and the pleasure of reading for children.

For the next week or so it doesn't matter that the weather is bad. The hush that yesterday descended on families as young people devoured the latest and last instalment in the Harry Potter saga won't be disturbed until his fate is discovered.

JK Rowling is to be saluted and applauded.

Against intense competition she has introduced a modern generation of media-savvy children to the glorious and timeless themes explored by Greek mythology, Dickens and Tolkein.

As the New York Times pointed out in the first review: "The world of Potter is a place where the mundane and the marvellous, the ordinary and the surreal, coexist. It's a place where owls can deliver the mail, where paintings talk and a mirror reflects people's innermost desires. It's also a place utterly recognisable to readers, a place where death and the catastrophes of daily life are inevitable and people's lives are defined by love and loss and hope . . . the same way they are in our own mortal world."