Death, Dismemberment and Redundancy, HP7
Overall I enjoyed this book quite a bit. There are some specific topics I wanted to address, both positive and negative though, so here it is, spoiler heavy so consider yourself warned.
Dumbledore:
I can't quite say "haha I told you so" since he turned out not to be entirely evil. But part of me can't help but feel smug at the major role Dumbledore's flaws played in the plot of this book and by extension the entire series.
Rowling has always been a fan of playing with the reader's perceptions of her characters and I've been convinced that Dumbledore's infalibility was a huge misconception ever since the "gleam of triumph" in the fourth book. As it turns out the gleam wasn't sinister as I originally assumed, but I think it was intended to tip people off to some degree.
Snape:
I think I could hear the fangirls around the world squealing when we finally took a long-overdue trip into Snape's past. I admit I never held much credence for the popular fannon theory (well, cannon now I suppose) that Snape was in love with Lilly but I do admit that it wraps his motivations up quite nicely. And I'm glad we didn't find out about it until after Snape's death, admitting to something like that while on anything short of his deathbed would have been wildly out of character.
The Malfoy Family:
They spent most of the series being slowly castrated of any importance or effectiveness. But I like how they were used in this book to show that no one side held a monopoly on family ties. Even Lucious had a marked desperation in saving his son and Narcissa's betrayal of Voldemort in the end was arguably the reason Harry's last ploy worked.
Mad-Eye Moody:
When it was first said that he fell I thought it was a bit anticlimactic to be honest. I knew someone had to die from that sequence but Moody seemed like too much of a fighter to warrant simply a mention of his death. I would have expected to see the scene more directly rather than have someone say "he fell". My opinion on his death changed, however, when Harry found his eye. That gruesome tidbit served as the oomph I had hoped for, which brings me to Umbridge.
Umbridge, though only briefly portrayed, was a defining moment in the book for me. She personified the betrayal of the ministry quite nicely. When we first saw her Dolores Umbridge was not necessairally a villain in the truest sense as her intentions were to create an orderly and peaceful society, her approach of weeding out those who did not fit her world view was something that she progressed into. The fact that in this final book she graduated from harassing students to plucking the eye off a corpse and lodging it in her office door for the express purpose of spying on her secretaries' productivity illustrated the downfall of the ministry as a benevolent force quite well.
Nineteen Years Later:
I am of the opinion that epilogues should be used when necessary for the sake of the story. This one, to put it bluntly, was seven pages of sentimental drivel that only provided new information in the form of the names of the offspring.
It was completely unnecessary. We already knew that Harry, Ginny, Hermione and Ron all survived and wanted to do their respective partners. We already knew Tonks and Remus' son survived and would grow up. If anything this extra chapter failed to show any improovements in the society. Nothing of muggle/wizard relations was discussed, or improovements to the treatment of magical creatures. All we saw was the exact same type of scene as was in the first book, indicating that the seven years of struggle achieved nothing. Of course we know that something actually was achieved, the previous chapter said as much, but then why go right back to square one again?
If you're going to make an epilogue that jumps nineteen years in the future tell us what has been achieved in that time, other than some predictable procreation. Tell us how the society recovered. Then again even that was partially covered in the previous chapter which makes the idea of an epilogue even more pointless.
I realize these seven pages are probably the chapter that Rowling likes to boast she's had written since the beginning, which may explain why it seems so disjointed from the rest of the book, but that is not excuse for leaving in a sloppy ending.
Like I said at the beginning, I genuinely enjoyed this book. It's because I enjoyed it so much that I find the epilogue so dissapointing, much like the tacked-on ending of A.I.
Dumbledore:
I can't quite say "haha I told you so" since he turned out not to be entirely evil. But part of me can't help but feel smug at the major role Dumbledore's flaws played in the plot of this book and by extension the entire series.
Rowling has always been a fan of playing with the reader's perceptions of her characters and I've been convinced that Dumbledore's infalibility was a huge misconception ever since the "gleam of triumph" in the fourth book. As it turns out the gleam wasn't sinister as I originally assumed, but I think it was intended to tip people off to some degree.
Snape:
I think I could hear the fangirls around the world squealing when we finally took a long-overdue trip into Snape's past. I admit I never held much credence for the popular fannon theory (well, cannon now I suppose) that Snape was in love with Lilly but I do admit that it wraps his motivations up quite nicely. And I'm glad we didn't find out about it until after Snape's death, admitting to something like that while on anything short of his deathbed would have been wildly out of character.
The Malfoy Family:
They spent most of the series being slowly castrated of any importance or effectiveness. But I like how they were used in this book to show that no one side held a monopoly on family ties. Even Lucious had a marked desperation in saving his son and Narcissa's betrayal of Voldemort in the end was arguably the reason Harry's last ploy worked.
Mad-Eye Moody:
When it was first said that he fell I thought it was a bit anticlimactic to be honest. I knew someone had to die from that sequence but Moody seemed like too much of a fighter to warrant simply a mention of his death. I would have expected to see the scene more directly rather than have someone say "he fell". My opinion on his death changed, however, when Harry found his eye. That gruesome tidbit served as the oomph I had hoped for, which brings me to Umbridge.
Umbridge, though only briefly portrayed, was a defining moment in the book for me. She personified the betrayal of the ministry quite nicely. When we first saw her Dolores Umbridge was not necessairally a villain in the truest sense as her intentions were to create an orderly and peaceful society, her approach of weeding out those who did not fit her world view was something that she progressed into. The fact that in this final book she graduated from harassing students to plucking the eye off a corpse and lodging it in her office door for the express purpose of spying on her secretaries' productivity illustrated the downfall of the ministry as a benevolent force quite well.
Nineteen Years Later:
I am of the opinion that epilogues should be used when necessary for the sake of the story. This one, to put it bluntly, was seven pages of sentimental drivel that only provided new information in the form of the names of the offspring.
It was completely unnecessary. We already knew that Harry, Ginny, Hermione and Ron all survived and wanted to do their respective partners. We already knew Tonks and Remus' son survived and would grow up. If anything this extra chapter failed to show any improovements in the society. Nothing of muggle/wizard relations was discussed, or improovements to the treatment of magical creatures. All we saw was the exact same type of scene as was in the first book, indicating that the seven years of struggle achieved nothing. Of course we know that something actually was achieved, the previous chapter said as much, but then why go right back to square one again?
If you're going to make an epilogue that jumps nineteen years in the future tell us what has been achieved in that time, other than some predictable procreation. Tell us how the society recovered. Then again even that was partially covered in the previous chapter which makes the idea of an epilogue even more pointless.
I realize these seven pages are probably the chapter that Rowling likes to boast she's had written since the beginning, which may explain why it seems so disjointed from the rest of the book, but that is not excuse for leaving in a sloppy ending.
Like I said at the beginning, I genuinely enjoyed this book. It's because I enjoyed it so much that I find the epilogue so dissapointing, much like the tacked-on ending of A.I.