Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling.  

The seventh Harry Potter book – if you've read this far into the series, you've probably already snagged a copy and have made up your mind one way or another. While I couldn't avoid the constant signs and markdowns a couple of months back, I wasn't sufficiently motivated to queue up on release eve for a deal or slap down retail price for The Boy Who Lived. My first impression was the book's relative lightness – just around 600 pages. The second was that Rowling's writing hasn't gotten any more grown-up with her characters – the plotting and pacing is definitely one of a ya novel, and not a terribly sophisticated one.

The novel opens with Harry and the Order fleeing Death Eaters as the Ministry's become a tool of You-Know-Who and wizard Britain's turning into a xenophobic fascist state. (Real-world parallels are staggeringly obvious as always.) There's a split between horocrux treasure hunt with Hermione and Ron and Voldemort's attempt to find one of the mysterious titular hallows.

There are plenty of character deaths, but perhaps because of the volume and the past, the ones that are given the most emotional import aren't the ones you'd expect. A scene where Harry buries a fairly minor figure is given more space than the death or more major ones to emphasize magical relations. The action, when it occurs, is fast-paced, and not particularly violent, and there are an awful lot of rather convenient tyings up of loose ends – this is a book that knows its the last of its sort, and suffers from some rather hasty plotting in my opinion. My biggest problem with this wasn't the nebulous nods to the afterlife or the treasure-hunting, but it's similarity to fan fiction; the trouble with a series with this much speculation behind it is that some rather good fan authors have already offered us remarkably close takes on much of the action – sometimes in prose that is more advanced and better suited for an adult readership.

Deathly Hallows, while a must read for anyone who's bothered with the first six novels, fails on its own merits because of the weight of it's own popularity; the ending is a bit too neat, the baddies a bit disappointingly impotent, and the heroes are rushed through their paces with no time for actual character growth. My advice would be to read this, then find yourself a recommendation site for some good AU fic.

Read September 2007