Book Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
(WARNING: This review contains mild, very general SPOILERS. You probably guessed them all already, but if you don’t want to hear a shred of information about the book before you read it, stop now.)
The last of the Harry Potter books, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was released yesterday. You probably already have your copy. I was lucky to have a certain family member who ordered the book from Amazon to have it delivered on the 21st, and then decided to go on a backpacking trip over the weekend. I spent pretty much all day yesterday reading the book, which should tell you two things: first, it’s another brick of a novel, clocking in at 759 pages, at second, it’s quite engaging.
I’ll say this about J.K. Rowling: she knows how to create a vivid world and characters that seem real enough to make us readers care about them. She’s spent a long time crafting Harry’s world and its inhabitants, and it shows. I couldn’t help but a feel a little like this was a typical “highlights reel†sort of ending to the series, as many locations and characters from the previous novels pop up throughout the book. I’m not as rabid of a Harry Potter fan as many, so there were quite a number who I couldn’t recall just who they were. Still, all in all, there never seemed to be anything that was revisited just for the sake of it, and it all worked out well on the whole.
It’s definitely a dark story. Lots of people die, or come very very close to dying. This shouldn’t really come as a big shock to anyone — with Voldemort back, the kid gloves are off. Rowling is adept at keeping her plot moving, and while there were some stutters in pacing, for the most part it does an excellent job of keeping your eyes glued to the page. The actual prose is fairly simple, in keeping with the previous books and the fact that the series is written for children. Still, a little more depth to the narrative language would be nice. There were times when I felt like I really didn’t need to be paying too much attention to the text on the page.
Harry Potter occupies a similar space to that which the Odyssey, the Iliad, or Spenser’s Fairie Queene did in their day. It’s the modern epic, and the Deathly Hallows does a good job of concluding the whole affair. It’s not a perfect book by any means, but it does wrap up the various ongoing storylines, is an easy read, and goes out with a bang.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling. Scholastic. 2007. $34.99. Amazon link.
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