Word: potter
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...That's a lot of plot, and there's more besides. This isn't the most elegant of the Potter volumes: the sheer number of Macguffins in play gives the story a lumpy shape, and Rowling's prodigious narrative imagination constantly tempts her to overstuff the story. That kind of thing can be frustrating on a first reading, when you're hellbent on getting to the denouement, but it's exactly the kind of thing you appreciate on later re-readings, when you can stop and let chance details catch the light, and groove on the richness and sheer high...
...blank areas on the map. We get a breakneck tour of the bowels of Gringotts and the interior of Malfoy Manor. (Her portrait of the Malfoys, the evil family who nevertheless love each other with a strange, sinister tenderness, is one of the unexpected pleasures of the late Potter books.) The goblins get a more extended cameo appearance. At one point Harry casts a spell with three wands in one hand, resulting in a triple-charged sorcerous assault, which expands my understanding of the laws of magical physics. Harry also takes a road trip to Godric's Hollow, which...
...Speaking of last shots, it's time for the critics to take theirs, too. I have my share of pet Potter peeves - including Peeves the poltergeist, who spends his afterlife being eternally unfunny - and I'll never get a better chance to air them. I've always found the Accio charm to be ridiculously useful, to the point where it's implausible even by magical standards - "Accio Hagrid" indeed! The house-elves are strangely overpowered too: they can, for example, apparate in and out of Hogwarts, a fact that Rowling notes but doesn't really explain. With Dobby freed from...
...farewell to the series, Deathly Hallows is everything fans of Harry Potter could hope for. It does not reach the lyrical high-watermarks of the series - everyone has their favorites, mine being the final watercolor mourning scenes in Order of the Phoenix, with the mirror, the ghosts and, of course, Luna Lovegood. ("She's great, isn't she?" Ron says of Luna in Deathly Hallows. "Always good value.") But then again, this isn't a lyrical interlude, this is the grand finale. It calls for big battles and high body counts, force majeure and not legerdemain, and Rowling leaves...
...sadness is more an instant nostalgia for the unironic, whole-hearted unanimity with which readers embraced the story of Harry. We did something very rare for Harry Potter: we lost our cool. There is nothing particularly hip about loving Harry. He's not sexy or dangerous the way, say, Tony Soprano was. He's not an anti-hero, he's just a hero, but we fell for him anyway. It's a small sacrifice to the one that Harry makes, of course, but it's what we, as self-conscious, status-conscious modern readers, have to give, and we gave...