Saturday, 11 August 2007 07:05 pm
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deckardcanineFinished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows today. Without spoiling anything, let me say that I didn't expect it to be nearly so good. After Book 2, there had been an accelerating trend of diminishing returns for me. Book 6 was almost a chore for me, and the picture it painted for the finale was unpromising -- sorta like The Three Investigators with a LotR twist. But in the largely formulaic series, the departure from the usual turned out to be for the best.
I haven't seen many reviews, but among not fully satisfied fans (as opposed to all-time razzers), the most common complaints I see are a few slow periods and an epilogue which told too little -- or too much, depending what you wanted. I thought that overall, the exciting parts more than made up for the duller-but-seemingly-just-as-necessary parts. As for the epilogue, I was just satisfied to know the resolution of the main problem. The rest was just cute details to me.
Others expressed dissatisfaction with Rowling for holding back on darkness or not making the villains wiser. Those people had a good idea what to expect here. I didn't mind; I prefer tempered darkness, even if it means a reduction in credible villain efficacy. If anything threatened to curtail my enjoyment, it was the Dumbledorean philosophy, but even that wasn't ultimately bad IMO.
I won't say it's my favorite in the series. That's hard to decide. But I appreciated its many reference to the other six books and its revelation of the many secrets I had been left aching to learn. In part, I had been waiting for some little-used characters to justify their presence as something other than uninteresting redundancies. To me, there was only one major failure on that part. Hardly enough to leave me in a funk.
I will now pass the book on to its rightful owner, my mom, who hopefully has had no more spoiled for her than I did this time.
I haven't seen many reviews, but among not fully satisfied fans (as opposed to all-time razzers), the most common complaints I see are a few slow periods and an epilogue which told too little -- or too much, depending what you wanted. I thought that overall, the exciting parts more than made up for the duller-but-seemingly-just-as-necessary parts. As for the epilogue, I was just satisfied to know the resolution of the main problem. The rest was just cute details to me.
Others expressed dissatisfaction with Rowling for holding back on darkness or not making the villains wiser. Those people had a good idea what to expect here. I didn't mind; I prefer tempered darkness, even if it means a reduction in credible villain efficacy. If anything threatened to curtail my enjoyment, it was the Dumbledorean philosophy, but even that wasn't ultimately bad IMO.
I won't say it's my favorite in the series. That's hard to decide. But I appreciated its many reference to the other six books and its revelation of the many secrets I had been left aching to learn. In part, I had been waiting for some little-used characters to justify their presence as something other than uninteresting redundancies. To me, there was only one major failure on that part. Hardly enough to leave me in a funk.
I will now pass the book on to its rightful owner, my mom, who hopefully has had no more spoiled for her than I did this time.
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You too, huh? I actually found myself wondering if Rowling had farmed it out to some fanfic writer in some places (especially towards the beginning). And the Horcrux search setup sounded like a video game to me ("You know, like, when they're all together they're a source of unspeakable evil, but then they all get separated and you have to collect them, so, like... the first board would be the jungle board, and maybe the second board is Ice World...")
That said, I hope to be impressed once again when I finally get ahold of book 7.
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