Another Harry Potter fan. I thought it was great of her to do this series. I especially enjoyed how the story evolved according to age. What I mean is that the first book is written for a lower grade level readability and gradual increases through the series. During my younger years we had J.R.R. Tolkien, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Piers Anthony, Alan Dean Foster, Anne McCaffrey and others in the fantasy and scifi genre, but they were geared more toward adults.I have even enjoyed J.K. Rowling and even A.A. Milne.
Burroughs if anyone doesn't know wrote the original Tarzan, and wrote a SciFi series known as the Barsoom series.
It is all my Dad's fault, he gave me the SciFi bug. BTW, the Dresden Files series I mentioned earlier is a detective series. It is just in the modern world and he has to deal with magical bad guys. You can't help laughing at the opening of one of them with him running from a group of blue monkey demons flinging flaming feces at him. It can be read here:
http://www.jim-butcher.com/books/dresden/6/ch1/
If you haven't read them, start with the first as there is a lot of back story working up to this one.