Book Report: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Torgo approves(Of course you shouldn't read this if you haven't read the book but intend to.)
Some of us (ahem) end up like Harry Potter with a wife and kids and it takes a week to read a 750-page book.
Sometimes I hate the media. I avoided reading reviews of this book, but of course I kept seeing headlines. The one that stuck out in my mind was "A fitting end for Harry Potter." That says it all, really. You know it's a happy ending. You know, more or less, how it'll be.
But then, J.K. Rowling has never shown herself to be a risk-taking writer. That's my complaint with this book (and the series as a whole). Her prose is awkward, forced, and clumsy. She has a brilliant imagination, regardless of how much she borrows liberally from other fantasy tales, but too often, especially in the beginning and end of each book (also, here in the tedious middle passages where months need to pass but no action exists to fill them), it's as though she knows she just has to write to a point but has no ability to get there with style.
Someone said to me, "After all, this is a children's book," but that's silly. Children's books can be written with zeal and flourish. See Dr. Suess.
That aside, this is a fitting end for Harry Potter. Many people needed to die to make the stakes real and the action visceral, and they do. (Honestly, I was happy at some points that the cast was getting thinner -- to remember all these characters in the years between books, especially when one reads the book so quickly, is daunting.) Good must win, and it does. Dumbledore, despite being dead, and his pensieve must clog the final chapters with frustratingly slow "explain it all" sidestories - Deus ex Machina, Potter-style.
There's a great deal of fun, action, even some romance. It's awfully violent, and I foresee it being a movie that really is in no way good for kids. But it's a gripping read, more so than book 5, certainly. Probably more than 6. I don't really remember 6.
I'm happy with it.
posted by Torgo @ 1:33 PM
1 Comments:
My gripe wasn't with marriage or having kids in general, it was with the age-old, overused happy ending, which was: everybody marries the person they were dating when they were 16 or 17, has kids, and lives happily ever after. The series is for younger readers, and I think those readers should know it's OK not to marry the first real bf/gf they ever have. Would it have been so hard for one of the teen couples to marry other people and have kids with them (or not), but still remain friends?
Also, I admitted I was projecting; my newly-pregnant sister has made several comments to me about how I should only date guys I'm thinking of marrying or how I need to get married next summer because that "what's done," and I don't think that's cool. So I definitely read the epilogue with a lot of baggage; but that's what adults tend to do, not the intended HP readership.
I think Books 5 and 6 were way better than this last one, though like you said, I'm happy with the way she wrapped up the series.
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