Potter Review

One more Harry Potter post. This weekend I finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows. SPOILER ALERT: some things I say here might be spoilers if you haven’t read the book.

Despite the time lag between reading the previous book, I quickly got into the characters and story. Overall, I liked the book. It was fun to follow along on Potter’s quest and to see the arc of the three main characters coming to a seven-book fruition. There’s a long section of the book where the three main characters are traveling from spot to spot that, to me, began to run long. Not to say that the places they went and the things they did or that happened were unimportant. Just that I began to think, oh here we go again.

None of that detracts from J.K. Rowling as a writer, though. The world and characters she created are amazing and it is so easy to see how kids and adults alike can get lost in her books and hunger for more. There’s even one point in the book where I cried.

My least favorite part of the book was the Epilogue.

SPOILER ALERT. I did not want to see the main characters as adults. From the book itself, I know who died and who lived. It ended on an up note with an exciting climax. Then Rowling takes us into a ho-hum existence of the leads. They might as well have turned into Muggles or bland middle-class suburbanites. Not what I wanted for Harry, Hermione and Ron.

I think I know one reason why she did it. She wanted it clear that she had no plans to write another Harry Potter adventure. She left it open in the Epilogue for the possibility of an adventure of one of the offspring. But the feel I got was: here, this is it, I’m done with Harry. Well, jimminee cricket, give him at least a teaching position at Hogwarts or something other than mundane adulthood. END OF SPOILER.

But, Epilogue aside, I recommend the book. But not by itself. You gotta read the books leading up to it. I’m well past my teen years, but even I’m sorry there won’t be another Harry Potter book.