SPOILERS. Colbinski and Nimero are engaging in a back-and-forth discussing the final Harry Potter book. All matters in the book will be discussed. SPOILERS
Click here for Entry 1 of this Roundtable
I agree with Colbinski that it was an impressive and entertaining read. I do have some quibbles to be addressed, though. Both with Colbinski and with the book overall. While the story does move briskly and Rowling has an uncanny ability to end each chapter with you wanting more, there is a tendency for the story to flag a page or two into each chapter. Then the chapter picks up again, some action occurs usually preceded by helpful exposition, and then off to a humdinger of an ending.
It works. It works well. But looking back over the book there’s too much. Too much close calls. Too much of teenagers defeating adult wizards who in later scenes we see dueling evenly with other accomplished wizards. I would have been happier with spending time with the quest rather than it becoming a chase story. I agree about the Umbridge sidetrack. Umbridge is never mentioned again. Was she a Death Eater or just a loyal ministry bureaucrat? Her name isn’t mentioned during the Battle of Hogwarts so I suspect the latter although she seemed too gleeful about torture not to join, no?
I have no quarrel with how much face time Snape received. The “Is Snape good or bad?” question was one of the most important going into this book. Keeping him off the page and out of the action was wise. It did not become a distraction to attempt to parse all of Snape’s actions into answering that question. In fact, the answer to this question was about the only correct prediction I had concerning this book.
It is a very clever book set up nicely by its predecessors. Snape is explained cleverly. Sharing Dumbledore’s wisdom is clever. Having house elves and goblins we meet earlier in the series play roles is clever. I’m sure if I reread all the books at once I will see even more connections and foreshadowing (Colbinski already points out the Dumbledore trading card). One area that Rowling was not clever enough was the gifts left to Hermione. Hermione is constantly reading the book left to her by Dumbledore but I’m not sure any useful information is gained from it. She notices the Deathly Hallows sign in the book which leads them to Harry’s birthplace and then to the Lovegood house. As Dumbledore wanted them to be looking for Horcruxes and not the Hallows this obviously wasn’t the information he intended her to glean. So what was the purpose of the book to Hermione? Am I missing some other information it provided?
My biggest criticism is the epilogue. Partly because I never approved of the Harry/Ginny connection I didn’t really care to see them married with kids. Mostly because it was just too tidy. The small glimpses we see are the characters as we know them from the seven years the books cover only now with kids. There’s no insight to the effect of the world on them for the past nineteen years. They are living as you would imagine them living if Voldermort never returned and everything went swimmingly during their time at Hogwarts. At the end of the Battle of Hogwarts it is noted how wizards of all ages and Houses and bloodlines were sitting together with elves and centaurs. The scenes with the goblin and house elves intimated that there may be integration of all magical creatures throughout the wizarding world. Did that happen? Was the Minstry of Magic still a useless governmental agency or could it now affect change? I was less interested that Harry’s kid didn’t want to be a Slytherin than the fact that Hogwarts still held different Houses. I wanted to know if house elves were liberated or if goblins could use wands. I know the epilogue is there to put to rest any talk of Voldermort not being dead or a way to stop any further Harry adventures. But it seemed pointless. The last two sentences of the epilogue would have worked as well, if not better, as the last two sentences of the final chapter.
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