Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

If you haven't read the book, stop reading now - spoilers ahead!




I haven't had time to read this until now, but I finished it in a night! Pretty decent. The beginning was very exciting but the excitement slackened off slowly. The wedding bit and surrounding parts were slow...Grimauld place was slow...the long, long, long period of wandering around forests hiding was incredibly slow. The real problem here is that Harry Potter usually has a wide array of characters and subplots running simultaneously at Hogwarts. The much more limited cast of Harry, Ron and Hermione (and for a short bit, just Harry and Hermione) was very different than setting of the other books. Harry, Hermione and Ron had their usual minor fights, but without anything else to serve as a backdrop or distraction, it was pretty dull.

The ending was decent. I have to admit I feel a large part of Harry's development at the end was practically exactly the same as what happened in Tales of the Abyss, but I doubt the author knowingly ripped it off. It was still good however. Dumbledore's shift from the perfect idol to a fallible human was also quite interesting. It was somewhat undermined by the fact that everything ended up following his plan anyway.

Anyway, a good book. I still haven't thought everything through about it, but my general feeling is that it was very different from the other books, and much simpler due to the lack of subplots.