This weekend was dedicated to Harry Potter's new book, all 607 pages of it. I am quite impressed with myself that I managed to finish the whole book by 12.30am on Monday morning (basically Sunday night, 30mins past midnight lar).
So how was the last book? I've given my comments below but have whitened them out coz they are full of spoilers and I dun like to ruin the book for any of you who are still reading it. So simply use your mouse to highlight the paragraphs below to read my comments...
SPOILER ALERT
Who dies?
The biggest question on everyone's minds is who dies? I think JK Rowling (JKR) noes everyone is guessing like mad so she was kinda notti coz she makes sure there is more than one death. So as I read the book, I kept wondering, is this THE death everyone is talking about. It starts of with Mad-eye dying... I was like.. hmm.. ok... so he dies. Then a surprised for me was when Dobby the house elf appeared in the story to save Harry and his friends from the Malfoys and ends up getting killed. Having read the two deaths, I thought.. ok lor, Harry won't be dying liaoz. Then more deaths occur... Fred Weasley, Remus Lupin and his new wife Tonks. Then came Severus Snape. That caught me offguard a little. And finally, JKR decides to kill Harry too!! For a few pages anyway. He comes back to life and kills Voldemort (of course). Quite alot of deaths I must say. For me, the most stirring death was a fight between Dobby's and Harry's. But since Harry doesn't realli die, I must say I really like how Dobby's death and burial was handled.
Is Harry a Horcrux?
Yeah... this was pretty much guessed by everyone. It wasn't difficult to guess that Voldemort has a piece of his soul in Harry since Harry survived his attack as a baby. So, I kinda also knew that Harry would somehow had to get rid of that piece of Voldy's soul at the end. The onli question was would Harry have to die.
Will Dumbledore come back?
I was betting that Dumbledore will pull a phoenix and resurrect somewhere in this last book. Well, I lost that bet. He does appear to chit chat with Harry at the end but he doesn't come back. Guess that might have been just a little too cliched if he did.
Is Snape evil?
Up till the very last few chapters, Snape is still seen to be evil. So, although I was guessing he was actually good, I had given up on it 3/4 way through the book. But, that was all resolved when Harry picked up Snape's memories when he died and looked thru them in the Pensieve in Dumbledore's office. A nice back story I think. Kinda sad to learn about the relationship between Snape and Lily (Harry's mom).
Best section?
I realli liked the battle at Hogwarts. The whole battle lasted around 100 pages out of the 600page book. I thought it was done very well, very epic. It had everyone coming back to help, it had good vs evil, it had giants and gigantic spiders... very exciting stuff. I can't wait to see how they handle this in the movie. It will really be a fitting end to the whole movie series if they did this on the scale of LOTR battles.
Coming in a close second is the whole Gringotts affair... how they break in to how they escape. I can just imagine the dragon guarding the vault (awesome image) and how they had to hunt for the Horcrux among all the treasures. Good stuff.
YAWN parts?
Some parts were a little slow but it doesn't realli spoil the pacing too much. The sense of time through the whole book seemed just a little off to me coz they sometimes spent weeks just thinking of where to go to look for the next Horcrux. Sounded like an awful waste of time. I also didn't really get the last section '19 years later'. So we find out who marries who and wat they name their kids. But.. so what? It's a little hard to try to imagine Harry, Ron, Hermione and Ginny 19 years later and the short section doesn't do much to give them much character. I thought I could do without that part.
So is it any good?
The simple answer is yes. I enjoyed the book and it was a decent ending to the entire series. I think JKR has mentioned that she won't be writing anymore Harry Potter stories, but I think it might be interesting for her to tell other stories like maybe Dumbledore's adventures? Well, books may have ended but still have two movies to go. And I'll probably have to reread Half-blood prince and Deathly Hallows one more time to try to understand the stories better.
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