Spoilers spoilers oh my god spoilers

If you have not yet read the final Harry Potter book and plan to, you should probably stop reading right now. Although why you weren't up until five in the morning finishing it like Alma and I were is a mystery.

Just to be safe, the following will appear in dark blue text to match the blog background. Highlight it if you actually want to read. Non-fans are hereby given a reprieve.



I didn't believe for a minute that Rowling was going to kill Harry, despite (and indeed because of) all her coy little "What makes you so sure he's going to live to adulthood?" answers to fans asking if there couldn't be more books telling Harry's story as an adult. The better answer for why there don't need to be any more books is answered by the final words of Deathly Hallows, which turned out not to end with "scar" as Rowling had said: "All was well." The "Nineteen Years Later" epilogue seems more like something to placate the people who wanted to know - yes, Harry and Ginny end up together, and yes, so do Ron and Hermione - and frankly I think she could have worked a bit more into it. For example, the only person whose profession we learn is Neville, who (unsurprisingly) is now Herbology teacher at Hogwarts. None of the "Big Five" characters we see on 9 3/4, however - the above four, plus Malfoy - appear to be at Hogwarts in any capacity. So what are they all doing? A rather unimportant question in the grand scheme of the books, I suppose, but one that she probably could have answered without much significant effort. That said, I believe her when she says she has no plans to revisit the series. Again, with no conflict of the sort that enveloped books 1-7 - and how could you top the struggle against Voldemort for high stakes? - it's hard to see where it would go. Sure, fans would eat up a tamer series with smaller conflicts, but why would she want to write it? She's already got more money than God, so that rules out one key motivation.

I was glad to see that most of what I wanted to happen did, and that a lot of what I predicted would happen did - Neville ended up playing a key role in Voldemort's downfall, as I thought had been strongly hinted by the fact that the prophecy could have referred to him before Voldemort attacked Harry instead, and Snape did end up being a good guy, although it took until the last possible second to reveal this. After Snape's major role in the last two books, he seemed woefully underused in the final chapter, but given how little of it takes place at Hogwarts, and the fact that Snape was not really a bad guy, that's probably understandable. Naturally I was happy with Harry surviving - Rowling's prediction that some fans would not like the book presumably referred to the fatalists who thought it made sense that Harry should die. I'm not saying there was no way that could have happened that would have worked, but I was glad it didn't. I was also glad to be wrong about my prediction that either Ron or Hermione seemed likely to die given the way the death ante had been upped in each of the previous books; evidently the sheer volume of casualties in this one made up for that. (It almost seemed perfunctory by the end. The deaths of Tonks and Lupin, for example, were referred to so briskly that Alma actually missed the initial reference and then, upon seeing a reference to it a few pages later, asked me in confusion when they had died. Frankly I think that those two characters deserved a little better than "And then Harry saw Tonks and Lupin and they were dead!", which is basically all they got, but that's one of my few serious complaints.)

Overall I enjoyed the last trip around the world of Harry Potter. It wasn't perfect - the middle is oddly slow and many parts are awkwardly expository, but in a lot of cases it's hard to see how else she could have gotten the information out, and anyway it's not like exposition-heavy dialogue hasn't pretty much been a hallmark of this series up to now. I got the happy ending I wanted, leaving me feeling good about the whole thing. (I had been worried that I might end up feeling like I did once I had finished the last Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book, Mostly Harmless, which ends, if cleverly, in ultimate depression. Instead I feel how I did when I finished the fourth book, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, which remains the way I like to imagine the books ended.) I guess it's a little sad that there aren't going to be any more, but the rich detail in Rowling's world should provide ample opportunities for re-reading over the years, which is all you can ask for. So long, Harry, and thanks for all the magic.