And In The End...

Well, that’s that. I finished around 2:30 last night, and due to my extreme grogginess, I decided to give it a little time to sink in. Overall, I thought it was a fairly satisfying ending. Rowling was never going to be able to please everyone, and while I did have two big problems with the book, I thought she managed to do the series justice.

First, due to the necessity of following Harry’s storyline, there’s a lot of important action that happens “offscreen”. Because of this, I felt like a lot of the work Rowling had done developing some secondary characters in the past couple of books was wasted. By the time these characters appear in Deathly Hallows, there’s not much left for them to do except make brief cameos in the final battle, and what they do contribute mostly feels rushed and forced. Actually, that‘s the same problem the last couple of movies have had. I guess it was just a matter of trying to fit everything into one book without making it 1200 pages long (not that most readers, me included, would have minded).

Second, the body count is pretty high in this book, and while some of the deaths were surprises, others had been obviously coming since book 4 or 5. The problem is, the more characters died, the less their deaths impacted me as a reader. I understand Rowling’s need to show the severity of the situation, but eventually I lost any sense of shock or surprise when someone else was killed, and by the end, I was simply keeping a mental list of the dead. Also, Rowling knew her readers would be expecting deaths, and she had a bit a fun with fakeouts involving major characters throughout the book (including a big one near the end). Unfortunately, this only ended up adding to the lessened impact when characters actually did die.

On the other hand, Rowling was trying to end an epic series that has a large (and largely young) fan base, so while I may not have agreed with all of her choices, I understand the necessity for many of them. I don’t envy her that task. But most of all, I appreciate the fact that she actually gave us an ending and didn’t go all David Chase on us. I’m not sure I could have handled the final Harry Potter book cutting off in the middle of a sentence.