[David Franklin]

Originally Posted by Beowulf1970

I finished this book on Saturday night and I did really enjoy it. It was a much darker book than the previous ones.. the words "Blood bath" spring to mind.

Gratuitious blood bath, at that. Particularly Lupin/Tonks - felt like JK got near the end, remembered she'd said some important people would die in HP7, so quickly killed off a couple of people off stage.

Killing off Mad Eye Moody at the start was a bit of a shock. he's what I would call the "military" wing of the Order of the Phoenix.

Only thing is, we've never really "met" Moody (just Barty-Moody), so I didn't really care. Hedwig going (and in such a banal way) was more of a shock I think.

I did find the end.. the final battle between Harry and Voldermort passed a little quickly. Sure there was the huge pitched battle at Hogwarts and all the notable deaths there. But the actual battle between good and evil.. seemed to pass very quickly. in the space of one or two lines of text actually.

Worse, the actual quality of writing at that point seems to fall apart. If someone had leaked the paragraph where V dies, I think everyone would have scoffed and said it was obviously stolen from a fan-fic. Really poor.

I actually missed the bit where Voldermorts spell backfired.. One second they have wands drawn and the next Voldy's gone Moldy! What? what did I miss.. since when did the disarming spell kill??

It didn't. Voldypants AK spell rebounded. Like it does every time he tries to AK Harry Potter. You'd think he'd have wised up!

That was a little "odd" as well. Using a disarming spell when he knew this was the last and most important battle? Surely he didn't know it would cause the unforgivable curse to rebound. So what was he going to do.. "I've got the elder wand now b*gger off and leave us alone?" Of course, it would never do for Harry to use the killing curse now would it?

I think your last sentence is the operative one here.

all in all a good read.. even if at times it read more like a camping book than a harry potter novel.

To me, the biggest problem with this book is the amount of stuff that happens because JK Rowling needed it to happen. Like Harry, Ron and Hermione hiding in the middle of the woods and just happening to overhear Dean Thomas et. al. discussing vital information. I think you can tell she was writing with half a mind on the screenplay as well.

Plot wise, I thought she really fitted a lot of things together very neatly; I was particularly impressed that she not only made Harry a horcrux and avoided having to kill him off, and made it make sense. But I really wish she hadn't pulled the "Hollows" out of nowhere for the last book. Other than the "uber-wand", the other 2 hollows didn't really seem relevant to the plot. And (like the time-turner that JK had to destroy from future books because it is so disruptive to logic) the whole idea of a "uber-wand" has a lot of problems once you look at it closely. And the "uber-wand" doesn't really seem necessary; as other's have pointed out, at the time of the final duel, V has already lost; he's mortal, his henchmen are dead or running, and he's completely surrounded. Even if he had killed Harry, he'd have been torn apart by spells from McGonagal et. al. within seconds.