Harry Potter. A review, I guess

Obviously, spoilers lurk ahead, so don't read them if you don't want.

Ready?

Good.

Quality-wise, I think that Deathly Hallows was pretty much on the same level as all the others. I've always thought that Rowling's strength lay not in plots but characters, and I think that book 7 exemplified this. The Ron/Hermione/Harry bickering felt extremely real: put any close friends that age in a stressful situation and people will get pissed off over stupid little things.

I actually thought that Harry seemed much less confident in this book than the prior ones, such as the way he got somewhat obsessed with the idea of the Hallows, and I think that was a smart move on Rowling's part. I imagine it would have been excessively easy to go the wrong way and not have Harry make important mistakes and not have him struggle; this made him seem a bit more human and believable.

The ending was OK. I wasn't particularly thrilled with it though I also wasn't disappointed. Almost all the loose ends were at least mostly tied up by the end, which is quite a feat when you consider the scope of the series. I'm torn how I feel about the reveal about Snape's agreement with Dumbledore - on the one hand it's nice to finally have an answer as to whether or not he was a good guy, but on the other, there was something appealing about having him ambiguous. I think that were Rowling's main audience younger (as they are still ostensibly kid's books) it would have been better leaving it an unknown, but for the wee ones I think that closure was good.

The one thing I didn't like was the happy-ever-after epilogue bit. For one, I don't particularly like warm fuzzy "everyone lives happily ever after and they don't have any scary problems any more" no matter what. And secondly I didn't find it terribly believable, at least as Harry's future. Here's this kid who has a fairly miserable childhood, gets a glimpse of getting out of it when he goes away to boarding school...and then he spends the next seven years of his life, from 11 to 18 years of age, literally fighting for his life. Sure he's also fighting for his friends and the Greater Good and puppies and all that, but it boils down to "There's this nasty dude who tried to kill you before, failed, and is really pissed off over that." So he spends all of his teen years quite literally fighting evil, finally wins, and then what, settles down into dull domestic bliss? I'm not entirely sold on that; I imagine he'd still be working off a bit of inner anguish at that point.

But all in all, it's a very sound YA book and a decent end to a decent saga. There were plenty of little things that tickled me (Luna's role, the throwaway about Neville being a professor at Hogwarts at the end, the brief reference to what Dumbledore said he saw in the mirror from book 1, etc).