Madeleine McCann Tests The Imagination Of Harry Potter Fans
HAVING stopped scaring children at the cinema, Madeleine McCann is now giving children sleepless nights at the bookshop.
“MADDY POTTER,” says the Mirror’s front page, “JK asks for Madeleine poster in EVERY shop selling her book.”
In this tabloid world where we are all friends on nickname terms, Maddy is being championed by JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter diaries.
Rowling has written to every bookshop selling her tome asking them to place a picture of Madeleine McCann at the till point.
Amid those spontaneous purchases for miniature books on chicken soup, Top Trumps and Nunzilla (the fire breathing nun) will be the face of the world’s most famous missing child since Charles Augustus Lindbergh Junior.
“This is fantastic,” says Gerry McCann, father of the missing child. And it is, but not in the way he thinks.
Says Gerry McCann: “I got her [Madeleine] a DVD and like most kids she is a fan. We look forward to reading the books to all three children.”
Cynics may read an endorsement in these upbeat words, Mr McCann’s clear statement that Madeleine will be found safe and well. But Rowling needs no endorsement.
“I fervently hope that posters displayed prominently in shops all over the world will help find Madeleine McCann and raise the profile of the many other missing children in different countries,” says Rowling.
Surely then the poster should be of those children?
But Rowling can only do so much. She imagines the good the posters will do. And children buying her book can stretch their imaginations beyond Potter’s spells and dark arts to what happens to little girls stolen from their beds.
“In Madeleine Mum’s New Hope”, the Express hears Gerry McCann say: “We’ve jointly come up with this poster. The reach of something like that really will be global.”
But Madeleine McCann went missing in Portugal. Is she likely to be in America, Canada, Brazil?
Or have things moved beyond finding Madeleine McCann, who is no longer a missing child but the face of all missing child the world over?
And what is the likelihood the bookshops will agree to put her by the till?
Posted: 17th, July 2007 | In: Madeleine McCann Comments (32) | TrackBack | Permalink
