Unnecessary? Oh, I'm sorry, I thought we were discussing the concept of labelling an author "the next J.K. Rowling". I must be in the wrong thread.
It wasn't even negative. Rowling did what she set out to do, and better than she probably expected anyone could do it. We all have different goals.
And if that's judgmental, I'll take judgmental over jumping down someone's throat for voicing an opinion any day.
You're perfectly free to state your opinion and vent your bile. The rest of us are perfectly free to react to it, and to check our cabinets to make sure we have ample supplies of troll repellent.
I have mine shipped in monthly from a dear little shop in Diagon Alley. At bulk rates, you might as well go for the best.
But back to topic:
I can't tell from the linked articles who is dubbing Shannon "the next JKR." Could be anyone from Bloomsbury (who, after all, have the cash for monster advances thanks to JKR) to the press to anyone on the streets. Almost every time someone finds out I write, the first thing they say (regardless of whether they know my genre and audience) is, "Oh, you mean like that Harry Potter thing?"
Okay, some say "that Twilight thing." But Harry still leads at about two-to-one. Poor Dan Brown has dropped way back in the pack. Watching to see if E. L. James makes a move on the outside (or whether all those chains and whips slow her down.)
From the description, as others have noted, Shannon's series sounds much more like
The Hunger Games and other YA dystopians than it sounds like Harry Potter. If Scholastic buys the US rights, it can invoke two of its heavy hitters and declare that Shannon is "the next Harry Potter but kind of more like Suzanne Collins!"
This will be an interesting one to watch, both for the marketing and the book itself.
