Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Harry Potter, #7) in Around the Year in 52 Books

Jul 15, 2008 Ciara rated it it was amazing

Shelves: kids-books, read-in-2006, read-in-2008, read-in-2007, read-in-2009, especially-great-novels

this is the only harry potter book i stood in line to buy. yup, at the midnight release. i went out for beers with jared & his friend bart to pass the time until i figured i should go get in line, but i waited a little too long, so the line was really long by the time i got there. luckily, my friend, who is also coincidentally named bart but isn't the same person as jared's friend bart, was already in line & he let me cut to stand with him. we were sandwiched in-between two bunches of teenage gi this is the only harry potter book i stood in line to buy. yup, at the midnight release. i went out for beers with jared & his friend bart to pass the time until i figured i should go get in line, but i waited a little too long, so the line was really long by the time i got there. luckily, my friend, who is also coincidentally named bart but isn't the same person as jared's friend bart, was already in line & he let me cut to stand with him. we were sandwiched in-between two bunches of teenage girls wearing full-on witch costumes, with hats & everything. they kept holding hands & screaming with excitement. i was getting REALLY annoyed, but then i would be like, "okay, it's cool that teenagers are reading. especially books that are like 800 pages long." then they would scream again & i would be annoyed again. jared & his friend bart refused to have anything to do with me once i was in the harry potter line. they left to go drink more beer. they wouldn't even acknowledge that they knew me because i was being such a super-nerd by standing in the line. but then the line started moving & i bought my book, & then i thought i should maybe socialize with my friend bart, since he let me cut & everything, but it was after midnight & both of us just wanted to go home & read our books. so we did. luckily, we both lived within three blocks of the bookstore. so we raced to our respective houses & i stayed up until almost 8am, reading. i read the book five times in the next three days. if i was awake, i was reading this book. it was AWESOME. non-stop action! fighting! swords! complex defensive charms! elf-related flashbacks! murder! lots of murder. dumbledore's mysterious past! "the flamboyant cut of [dumbledore's] plum suit" in book #6 is somewhat explained here: dumbledore is gay & his big love was grindelwald, the dark wizard! ah ha! the only thing i didn't like was the same thing no one liked--the epilogue. it was pretty obvious that it was written around the time of the second book (which rowling has admitted--she said she wrote the end & held on to it for all those years so she would know what she was writing toward & know that the books would eventually be over). the problem is that she became a much stronger writer with a much more well-developed sense of plot, pacing, dramatic tension, &, like, NAMING CHARACTERS as the books wore on. the epilogue should have been awesome, & instead, it was worse than fan fiction. but whatever. i can forgive that, because the harry potter books provide me with over 3000 awesome pages of non-stop awesome. ...more

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