Word: voldemort
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Harry Potter has a lot on his to-do list. There's all those Horcruxes to find, a bunch of Deathly Hallows to pick up (you'll find out), and he's supposed to become a man, and get the girl, and, yeah, he should probably slay Voldemort at some point too. But in a lot of ways Harry's story ended with the second-to-last book of the series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince...
...mystery." That sparkly wonderment is gone. As the curtain rises on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Scholastic; 759 pages), all Harry's parents and parent-figures - Sirius and Dumbledore - are dead. He's quit school, and he's got a job to do, picking up the shards of Voldemort's shattered soul. Any soft adult buffer between him and the world has been stripped away. He's riding the rims. Harry isn't having a good time anymore...
...Voldemort gets a political grip on the wider wizarding society, Ron, Harry and Hermione spend more and more time in hiding, at Grimmauld Place and elsewhere, and their story takes on some of the claustrophobia of Anne Frank's diary. In fact, the parallels to World War II are near-explicit: the Death Eaters agitate for the rounding up of Muggle-born wizards and "race traitors" the same way Jews and their sympathizers were rounded up under the Third Reich. The Ministry of Magic comes to resemble The Ministry of Truth from 1984, complete with a pseudo-Fascist bureaucracy...
Times are grim for the members and friends of the Order of the Phoenix, the group assembled to fight the evil Lord Voldemort and his henchmen, the Death Eaters, and the film teeters on the edge of despair. Harry is lonely and wounded at the beginning of the film, and even at the height of his happiness, embraced by Ron and Hermione and leading the group they call Dumbledore’s Army, Yates reminds us that happiness is only temporary by snapping the film back down into darkness and danger. Joy and sorrow seem to exist in the same...
...greater challenge is knowing that the fate of the wizard world rests on whatever strength he can summon. He must face down Voldemort the way other boys confront puberty--as a threat and a thrill that run seismic changes through his body. Precociously wise, Harry also seems prematurely tired, a wizened wizard at 15. And Radcliffe measures up to his character; his bold shadings reveal Harry as both a tortured adolescent and an epic hero ready to do battle. All of which makes Potter 5 not just a ripping yarn but a powerful, poignant coming-of-age story...