The fancy name for coming-of-age stories is Bildungsroman (loosely translated: growth novel). This word is featured in a column by Christine Chaney, a professor of English at Seattle Pacific University, in the 2014 spring issue of Response (SPU) magazine.

According to Dr. Chaney, the early Victorian novel Jane Eyre by Charolotte Bronte is a Bildungsroman. So is the entire Harry Potter series. A single character “often grows from childhood to adulthood, gaining wisdom through life experiences—while often making mistakes and suffering loss along the way.”

I was drawn to the article because I have begun a series which does just that—traces the growth of an Appalachian young man leaving his roots and entering the changing world of the nation’s capital at the end of the twentieth century. The protagonist must travel both geographically and culturally into the digital age. How does he adjust his childhood views within this new world?

All of us are characters in our own growth novel, only our growth does not end when we leave young adulthood.