Harry Potter and the Very Spoilery Review

There are SPOILERS in this review. Big fat juicy spoilers. Expect plot details, character deaths (and lives, as applicable), who's evil, who's good, EVERYTHING.
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Jesus Christ.

There are hundreds of things I loved about Harry potter and the Deathly Hallows, and millions of things I hated with the fire of a thousand suns.

But in the end, it came down (literally) to this:

One word review: SUCKITUDINOUS.

This book is just bad.

You could lose the first 500 pages of this book and still tell essentially the same story. Rowling ditches the Hogwarts school-year structure for this book, and simply falls apart without it. Voldemort sitting and talking. The trio cleaning the Burrow. The wedding. Teen wizard camp with Harry, Ron and Hermione. All completely pointless episodes that only serve as filler in a book that is otherwise tottering under the burden of revelatory exposition.

The inconsistencies render the entire plot of not just this book, but of all seven books, meaningless. If house-elves can side-along-apparate wizards into places wizards can't normally go, why didn't Voldemort catch himself a house-elf to take him into Hogwarts? And take the Elder wand. If Grindelwald stole the wand from Gregorvitch, how on earth was he its master? Then Dumbledore defeats Grindelwald - fair enough. But Dumbledore chooses to be defeated by Draco by wilfully not defending himself, and Draco still becomes master. Later, Harry simply steals Draco's wand (NOT the Elder wand), which somehow makes him the Elder wand's master?! The most asinine part is after all this, Harry tells Dumbledore's portrait in the end, "As long as I die a natural death, the wand's power dies with me."

(BTW, why doesn't he just break the damn wand and be done with it?)

The epilogue was in a league of its own as probably the worst commercially published piece of writing I've ever read, and that includes Mary Higgins Clark. Holy purple centaurs. To think how we spork poor teenage badfic writers who actually manage to do better than this bilge! Rowling seems to think that what we're dying to know about the post-war wizarding world is the names of Harry & Ginny and Ron & Hermione's kids. And that is ALL the info she gives us. Even the aforementioned badfic writers manage to tell us more: Harry is a Quidditch star, Ginny is a model, Hermione is Minister of Magic (Ron is usually forgotten). What's happened in the Ministry? Have wand regulations been changed to be more inclusive? Did Hermione take SPEW further? Did Harry and Ron become aurors? Did nothing change?

But by far the worst fault of this book is the unconscionable hubris that permeates every page of it. So all right, it's Rowling's story, and she can tell us any tale she pleases, but she writes this book as if she wanted to throw in some HUGE ideas and then hurry off to collect her paycheck without pausing to give those ideas a second thought. For example, there were all those references to World War II - could they have possibly been treated any more casually? The Wizarding World, it seems, is meekly bowing to a second wizarding holocaust without a word of protest - and yet, this idea remains unexplored, of vanishing importance next to that damned camping trip. Rowling racks up the body count as casually as throwing berries into a basket, with as little thought and as much cheer, more often than not. Just how many times do we need to have the message of "Death Is Arbitrary" hammered in, and just how incompetent is she that Remus Lupin's death is introduced and mourned in a total of four sentences?

If you expect her own plot to escape such thoughtless treatment, you're mistaken. Oh, the lost opportunities, the wasted potential. Dumbledore was Grindelwald's best friend! He shared the aims of the world's most evil wizard of the time, but we can't stop to dwell on that. Harry's sacrifice keeps the entire school safe from Voldemort - and that gets ONE LINE's worth of pagetime. Even shoddier is the way she deals with ideas and characters from previous books: Where was Ginny throughout the book? Dean Thomas has more pagespace than she does. Rowling forgets all about the Veil and the locked room in the Department of Mysteries - why set it up as a mystery if you won't return to it? All that buildup about Wormtail's life debt, and it comes to an utterly nondescript and random closure. Inter-house unity is in shreds as Slytherin house simply up and leaves in the middle of the battle. Dumbledore's line to Snape, "Sometimes I think we sort too soon," is the deepest betrayal of the concept of a united Hogwarts: possibly ALL TWO (count 'em!) halfway-noble Slytherins are not really Slytherins after all!

It felt like she was just slapping little patches all over the place on the book as a whole - consider how Snape just happens to pick the very memories from his lifetime to give to Harry that will exactly answer all the little questions Harry has about the subsidiary plots of this book. These patches consist of random factoids,hastily contrived magics and situations, and worst of all gratuitous death and dismemberment. It was hubris. "Watch me Grapple With Big Ideas, bucko," she said, before tripping on her own feet and falling splat. And the whole of Deathly Hallows is her scrambling to retain her dignity by saying, "I meant to do that."

Having said that, there were parts of the book that I didn't hate - even stuff I loved, even one part that moved me close to tears. I didn't mind that my predictions were almost all 100% correct - that's not Rowling's fault. Though I was never a fan of the Snape-loved-Lily theory even after I predicted it, Rowling managed to convince me in this book. I've seen a lot of reactions in fandom that are basically Yo, what a loser, but I disagree. Rowling's out on a limb here, a limb I can respect. She's saying that even unrequited love is love: it can be as strong and ennobling as what commonly passes for the real deal. This isn't the advice you'll get from Dear Abby, it isn't practical and maybe it even hurts you to believe it - but that doesn't necessarily make the thought untrue, and it took guts to say it.

It also took guts to knock Dumbledore off his pedestal so spectacularly. The guy in the long white beard is almost evil, and certainly a creep - whaddayaknow! Not only is he a manipulative bastard till the very end - he makes Severus Snape risk (and meet) death simply because he wants to delay giving Harry some information - he also succumbs to temptation at the end of his life, when he is supposed to have conquered his desire for immortality. I love it that we see why it is that Dumbledore sets himself against Voldemort so completely: they are just too alike for comfort.

So that's it, boys and girls. The end of the line, the finish of the Harry Potter saga. Whimper, whimper.

By which words I describe not the sounds I make, but the manner of this epic's exit.