Word: half-blood
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...wasn't. Half-Blood Prince goes a long way, finally, to working through Rowling's take on the psychology of evil, largely through a kind of Pensieve-aided documentary of Voldemort's early life. Much of Rowling's understanding of the origins of evil has to do with the role of the father in family life. "As I look back over the five published books," she says, "I realize that it's kind of a litany of bad fathers. That's where evil seems to flourish, in places where people didn't get good fathering." Some of that must surely...
Rowling is about to say goodbye to a very good friend: Half-Blood Prince is book six of a planned seven, and then that's all she wrote. "I'll be so sad to think I'll never write a Harry-Ron-Hermione sentence again," she says. But her feelings aren't entirely unmixed. "Part of me will be glad when it's over. Family life will become more normal. It will be a chance to write other things...
What J.K. Rowling does doesn't look that hard either. She's not a showy stylist or a Big Thinker, but in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Scholastic; 652 pages), the sixth novel in the Potter series, she weaves a remarkable number of narrative threads into a complex, moving and elegantly balanced whole, without any apparent effort. Rowling loves to wrong-foot readers, and the previous book, Order of the Phoenix, reads like the loins-girding preamble to an all-out, good-vs.-evil, wand-on-wand wizard war. But Half-Blood Prince turns out to be something...
...last secured the Defense Against the Dark Arts teaching job. Draco has his usual generic mischief cooking. Harry, now 16, has been made captain of Gryffindor's Quidditch team, and he has stumbled on a mysterious potions textbook that was formerly the property of--wait for it--a certain Half-Blood Prince. Meanwhile, Dumbledore and Harry, with the help of that always handy expository aid the Pensieve, are poring over the details of Voldemort's early backstory for clues to his intentions. Oh, and somebody's trying to kill Hogwarts students. As Hagrid puts it, with the barest trace...
...true believers, Half-Blood Prince will be pure pleasure. There's Quidditch, potion-class high jinks, apparition lessons, loads of snogging (Ron and Hermione are slowly sorting out their longtime mutual crush) and some lovely business with a golden potion called Felix Felicis that makes whoever imbibes it extra lucky. But this is the second-to-last book in the series, and for all the fun, the mood is darkening. You can't help but feel that Rowling is trotting out the fan favorites--your Tonks, your Luna, your Buckbeak, your Fred and George--for a final sunlit outing before...