A came-of-age story?

Here's a question for you, as I honestly don't know the answer:

Has there ever been a really successful came-of-age story?

We love coming-of-age stories, stories that focus on the progression of the hero from a naive youngster to a wiser and competent adult. Breaking Away, the 1979 movie starring Dennis Christopher and Dennis Quaid, was one such, and is still beloved, and rightly so. Betty Smith's novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is another, and has been in print since it was first published in 1943.

I was thinking about it because Toothless, the dangerous dragon from the animated film How to Train Your Dragon, was a balloon in the Thanksgiving Day Parade in Manhattan this year. I didn't see the parade; I only found out about it later. But it reminded me of how much I liked the original and disliked the sequel, and, you guessed it: Here Be Ye Spoilers.

The first film, centered on the young non-warrior Hiccup, was a great deal of fun and had a lot of heart. You have to accept that his small town of Viking lunatics could survive on a rocky outpost with constant dragon attacks and their livestock being stolen, which was where we come into the story. So, sure, it's preposterous, but we'll roll with it. Over the course of the film, Hiccup meets and saves Toothless, finds out why the dragons are attacking and stealing their flocks all the time, and leads humans and dragons to victory over the big bad in the film. The fact that the victory comes at a price only makes it that much more heartfelt. I enjoyed it.

The second film -- and of course this is all my opinion -- takes a dump on it all. It starts when we see Hiccup, now super slick and cocky and tough and a tribal big shot, having come of age, and that sets the tone throughout, that everything we liked has been turned on its head. His chieftain father gets killed. His mother, who was supposed to have been abducted when he was a little child, turns out to have gone with the dragons and left home, child, and husband to become a dragon lady -- WHAT? And no one ever says to her, "You left your baby boy for a bunch of flying lizards? Do you hate people or something? Couldn't you have sent a carrier dragon with a note saying, 'Love you, still alive, see ya one day, Mom'?" Nope, it's fine that she's a terrible mother. I didn't like anyone in the second film, even people I liked in the first one. It was only good when it was stealing emotional notes from the first movie. And it all started with the thought that maybe we don't really want to see more of the person who has come of age.

They never made Breaking Away II: Broke Away. Betty Smith didn't write A Shrub Also Grows in Brooklyn.

I have little interest in seeing the third Dragon movie, out in February.

Is it fair that I'm not interested in a character that's progressed to maturity? Isn't that the goal of childhood for the kid and his or her folks?

Yes, but the kind of story dictates the kind of sequel. When Shakespeare's or Wodehouse's comedies end in people pledging to be married, it doesn't mean we would want to see sequels forty years on with the heroes as old married couples. If they're happy, there's no story; if they're miserable, we feel cheated by the end of the first story.

When Disney did Bambi II, 64 years after the original Bambi, it may have been a bad idea but at least it wasn't about adult Bambi. No one is interested in adult Bambi.

Would we be interested in a TV show about Kevin, the kid from The Wonder Years, all grown up? Nope. Wisely, star Fred Savage said, "The show was about a time in your life. The show was about this finite moment in your life that has a beginning and an end, and I think that’s what makes people long for that time in your life."

Ah, someone says: How about a grown-up Harry Potter? That's different, says I, because the Rowling series is about a battle of good and evil in a fantasy world; its focus is not on the growth and development of one boy. It's a coming-of-age story only incidentally.

T. R. Pearson wrote an amazing trilogy, starting in 1985 with A Short History of a Small Place, followed by Off for the Sweet Hereafter and The Last of How It Was. The three books were told from the point of view of Louis Benfield, fictional kid in the fictional town of Neely, South Carolina. These don't count as coming-of-age books, because while Louis is an absolute delight as the long-winded narrator, the stories are more about his town and his family and his endless digressions than about him. And yet when Pearson wrote us a grown-up Louis in New York City in Glad News of the Natural World, the charm was lost. Whereas some awful things happened in the original books, they were related by Louis, not related to him; he becomes part of the dark side in the latter book, and it's painful. In that way it is like a coming-of-age book, or really a smart-kid-grows-up-and-gets-mixed-up-with-thugs book. It tries to be cynical sometimes, heartfelt others, and winds up insincere. (Louis's parents also come off worse in this book than in the originals.)

In the end, I think the main problem is that becoming an adult is one thing, and being an adult is another, and the genres don't really cross. It would be like Tom Clancy writing a ghost story starring Jack Ryan, or P. G. Wodehouse writing a war novel featuring Freddie Threepwood -- it could be done, but it would feel all wrong. One of Agatha Christie's rare missteps is (I think) The Clocks, a Hercule Poirot mystery that is actually a spy novel, published in 1963 when spy novels were huge and drawing-room mysteries were looking old-fashioned and quaint. Poirot is so good a character even in a minor role that he brings the story together and does solve the mystery, but the secret agency setting fits him poorly. Thus so the child-to-adult hero being seen as an adult; it's a different kind of story and it feels wrong.

Maybe there was one successful came-of-age story: Jo's Boys, the sequel to Little Men by Louisa May Alcott. Little Men was a sequel to Little Women, but was another coming-of-age book in its own right. Still, if Jo's Boys was a success, I imagine it worked because readers loved Alcott and would have read the phone book if she wrote it. But I'm not familiar with her work, so I can't judge Jo's Boys on its merits.

If you have any ideas or thoughts on this, please let me know; I'm genuinely curious about whether this is just me or if others feel the same. The sequel to the first Dragon movie made a pile of money, so I certainly could be mistaken.