Young adult books have seen phenomenal growth since the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling. These books aren’t just read by young adults but older adults as well. Analysts are asking why.

One reason, they say, is to read them along with their children.

Other reasons? Maybe some crave a literature that doesn’t include the explicit sexual scenes found increasingly in “adult” fiction. Maybe they wish to escape the darker novels that predominate today.

Is such reading an escape from reality? We all know, surely, that the good guys don’t always win in this world. We know the innocent sometimes suffer and end their lives still suffering.

Fairy tales don’t happen in real life, we say. And so they don’t, but sometimes the lessons found in them do. People like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, Jr. and multitudes of others not so well known show us the necessity for hope in a less than perfect world. We need hope as well as reality, perhaps a little “redeeming” value.