After so much anticipation, I finally held the book in my hands on the morning of Saturday the 21st and felt....dread. What if it wasn’t upto expectations? What if the golden trio ( Harry, Ron and Hermione) suffered a death? Surrounded by excited teenagers and children who were wondering what this fat Auntyjee is doing in their midst, beaming/looking nervous all over her face alternately, I turned to the first page and was hooked! This book is the best in the series after the Prisoner of Azkaban, in my opinion. I don’t want to give away much of the plot because that would ruin it for people who have yet to read it, and the idea of a review would be to encourage more people to do so. However, some spoilers are inevitable, so beware! Opening on a dark note, we see where Voldemort is and what he is planning.
Harry comes in only later but the action picks up from the first page. I was sucked in and the words made me feel Harry’s feelings, every step of the way, unlike Half-Blood Prince and Order of the Phoenix where I found it a little difficult to relate to some of his angst-ridden musings, perhaps because every page in this book clarifies the plot of the whole series a little more and you realise why everything was the way it was. The deaths are plenty, and I agree that its a blood-bath. Some of the best written chapters include the gringott’s one and the battle of hogwarts.
The best, in my opinion is where Harry meets Voldemort ( near the end ). The interesting thing in this book is the strong parallels with Arthur and Christ, and the themes of sacrifice, death and resurrection adding greatly to the beauty of the final face-off. The epilogue was very disappointing and I feel JKR could have done much better. We are not interested only in who married whom iin the survivors and how many children they had - we would have liked to know what they did with the lives they preserved at such cost - who became aurors, who became healers, etc.
And she’s left the the fate of one very major, very lovable character out altogether. JKR, what happens to Luna?????PLeeeease tell us. I can’t say much more without giving away major parts of the story, so I’ll add to this review in a few days. All this said, this book is a must-read.