Saturday, July 28, 2007

Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows

I finally finished Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows. Don't worry I wont reveal anything of the plot or the ending and I will try to avoid any spoilers but I'm going to discuss the book so if you read this and decide that I spoiled something don't complain to me, I'm warning you now, if you are the type of person who takes any hint of a spoiler seriously, STOP READING NOW and stop searching the internet for information on the book! I just don't want to listen to complaints :-)

While I enjoyed the franchise as a whole and have read the other books and seen the movies. Sure they were kids books, but they are entertaining and easy to read. At least they were. I have to say that for the first 400 pages this book has been more Harry Potter and the Dreary Shallows. Since Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire the storyline has been spinning its wheels to a certain degree, trying to avoid jumping to the final show down that had been set up at the end of the 4th book. Unfortunately JK Rowling had a 7 book deal so we've been left dealing with Harry Potter's impersonation of Kevin the Teenager for 2 1/2 books. Most of the characters from the previous books get sidelined in this one in favor of Harry wandering around aimlessly, followed by his friends whom I began to feel sorry for. The odd few pages of danger repeat themselves every so often just to make the reader think that the story is actually progressing but for most of the book we have to read about Harry clutching his scar and being depressed.

I had pretty much written off this book as a total flop until just after page 400 when the story finally kicked off and the adventure started feeling like an adventure. Several of the scenes over the final 200 pages are great. Large battles, mythical creatures, adventures, tragedy, bravery and sacrifice more make up for the previous 2/3rds of the book.

This is a book that needs to be converted into a film script and trimmed down. When it is it will work really well. I'm already looking forward to the movie which I already think will be the action adventure hit of 2010.

A final complaint, which may seem odd considering my previous complaints, but I would have liked to have seen more pages dedicated to what happened after the main adventure ended. I wanted to see what happened to all the characters not just a select few. To revisit Hogwarths, Hogsmeade, Diagon Alley and see how things change with the outcome of the story. Instead the last 10 pages felt like they were added on at the last minute before the book went to the printers. A real, "oh crap, we need to tell the reader what happened next" addition Maybe JK should have kept the original ending that was reported to have "scar" as the last word.

At the end yes I liked the book, when it finally kicked off as a proper adventure story. I'm glad I bought and read it but I'm also glad it's come to an end as I feel the story was beginning to suffer for being dragged out over so many books.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

My dear friend...... perhaps you should "get a life". You take yourself much too serious. (And I'm not talking about Mr. Black).