What a ride this has been.
One person can’t feel all that at once, they’d explode. – Ron Weasley, OOTP
Deathly Hallows explodes with emotions (yours, the characters) faster than a box of fireworks from the Weasley twins straight from the beginning. What makes a book good to me is the way it makes you feel – and this book does that. It doesn’t matter if you’re giggling at an intentional (or not) innuendo or bawling your head off at a well timed death, Deathly Hallows was an absolute rollercoaster ride of emotions – it made the reader feel, and often. Deathly Hallows was creepy, brutal, and bloodthirsty. It was also sweet, funny, and charming. It’s a great way to end this series.
This is the NON-spoiler review of Deathly Hallows.
The beginning was perfect. Kudos to JK Rowling for reading all of Chapter One in the webcast (which you can listen to here). I can’t think of a cooler place to start. It also fit the pattern of things being a little disconnected and third person, then we flip over to Harry, then we flip to the Order, then bam, we’re off on an adventure.
First of all, I get sniffy at the weirdest stuff, but I didn’t cry at the typical stuff. I’m really sure that’s not gonna hold when the movie comes out. So if you don’t cry either, that’s okay. You aren’t the only one.
The Hallows. Once you learn what that’s about and how it fits in, it becomes a lot to keep track of and there are momentary doubts everything’s going to get wrapped up. But it does get wrapped up.
The epilogue was awful. Yeah, I know it was written more of the style of the earlier books, or some would say, “I could write better fanfic than that”. Actually I could write better fanfic than that, and I don’t write fanfic. I know it was also written for the fans. This fan didn’t need it. I liked the ending that came right beforehand. It was very nicely summed up.
My questions got answered – it also raised a few more, of course. I know about Snape, I know about Dumbledore. I know what the horcruxes are and why they’re each important. I know who lives and who dies. I know what separates people like Voldemort from people like Harry.
Speaking of the inevitable movie, it will truly take an epic length film to do this justice, many have said – but will it really? There are plenty of opportunities to trim things down, but to try to sandwich Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows into tidy bite sized two hour and fifteen minute chunks would be disasterous and deplorable. Any producer who attempts to trim these novels down to anything less than two and a half hours (and even that would be cutting things badly) should be clearly run out of town and laughed at for even suggesting such a thing. Three hours would be the ideal length. That doesn’t seem so epic when you realize how many thousands of pages JK Rowling’s most delighted fans have read just to get through the series itself.
Start to finish (minus the epilogue), the book was action packed, likable, with an appropriate amount of humor sprinkled inside what could have been JK Rowling’s most depressing and bleak tale yet. A true companion piece to Half-Blood Prince, I liked it. It wrapped things up, and it did it’s job admirably.
Was it worth the hype? Every minute. Do I want JK Rowling to write more? Not really.
I would make an exception only if it were Hogwarts, A History. I don’t see why she’d need to write an encyclopedia – many sites exist to fill that need, painstakingly charting everything people eat, the gifts they give – anything you can think of, someone has probably referenced it (we’ve done quite a bit of cataloging ourselves). It would probably be filled with all sorts of minutiae, but do we really need it in book form?
Why not just publish the notebooks, the scratches in the margins, the things that didn’t make it in online? Her site does an admirable job of this already and is a perfect venue to keep interest in the place healthy.
Actually, it is not really necessary that we see more books about this world. The fans shouldn’t force her into doing so. I do know she could definitely not write another thing ever and that would be fine by me too – JK Rowling has given us a fantastic finale, and a great graduation present to everyone who has grown up with Harry.
It’s not good bye, really. We all have two movies to go!
Published: Jan 24, 2008 04:43 pm