Harry Potter thoughts — w/o spoilers

  • Fin­ished “HP and the Deathly Hal­lows”. And this is what I can say safely opine on with­out giv­ing away any­thing for those who haven’t read it yet:

    • Not that my opin­ion mat­ters in the ocean of opin­ions out there on this book, but still, I give it great marks. I don’t read a lot of recent fic­tion, so I don’t have a lot to com­pare it to. But as near as I can tell, I think it’s really han­dled well.
    • Specif­i­cally, I feel like I’ve been through a series of real dis­ap­point­ments with pop cul­ture finales recently (“Sopra­nos” black­out, any­one?), so I was glad to note that J. K. Rowl­ing was up to the task of keep­ing this last book read­able with­out going for cheap tricks like insult­ing the reader, point­lessly abus­ing the char­ac­ters, invent­ing con­ve­nient things to wind things up or any of that stuff.
    • In some ways, the pre­vi­ous books had reminded me of the kinds of things a young per­son would go through as they started to have a sense of God and of life’s great ques­tions. Not that I thought Rowl­ing had that in mind, just that it’s how any mythic tale that involves tran­scen­dent worlds is going to appear to me.
    • If that’s true, then this book con­tin­ues the grow­ing ten­sion she has pre­sented in the last two, and might cor­re­spond to a nascent Christian’s cri­sis of faith. Harry has been hav­ing to fig­ure out who to trust — he hasn’t always han­dled it well. He doesn’t always know who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy. He often con­fuses emo­tion with fact, bias with intu­ition, and guess­work with rev­e­la­tion. The joy he ini­tially expe­ri­enced in the magic world has given way to hard work, seri­ous choices and heavy respons­bil­i­ties (which is why I said I thought Rowl­ing was imi­tat­ing what it feels like to go through ado­les­cence). He has a lov­able way of finally revert­ing back to a child­like trust and humil­ity just as he’s about to screw every­thing up, and thank good­ness for that. There are quite enough jerk-characters in books already.

    There are some other themes that came up that I thought were very intrigu­ing, but I can’t go into ‘em with­out giv­ing things away. So it looks like I’ll have to do a sep­a­rate entry for that.


    Related posts:

    1. Harry Pot­ter and the Splin­tery Broomstick
    2. And speak­ing of Harry Potter …
    3. Harry Pot­ter — yeah, why not?
    4. Two thoughts about time
    5. Got a favorite Lenten book?

    July 23rd, 2007 | Grace | 2 Comments |

2 Responses and Counting...

  • Erica 07.23.2007

    Hey! I read it too! If you’d like to read my opin­ion check out my blog. I loved it!

  • Grace

    I was head­ing over there any­way. Kinda fig­ured you’d have some­thing to say.

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