harry potter and the deathly hallows
12:01 am, july twenty-first, the last book in the harry potter series was officially released, and i was there lined up at chapters, rather farther ahead than i should have been, to receive it. i started reading in the car on the way home, and didn't stop until the birds started mouthing off at me at 5:27 am. i then went to sleep and awoke four and a half hours later, began reading again at 10:05 am, and finished the book at 12:02 pm earlier this afternoon.
what follows is my review, which will be filled with, amongst other things, every spoiler you could possibly imagine. do not read any further if that is not agreeable to you. also, i wanted to write this with the book and all thoughts and feelings inspired by it still fresh in my mind, so my writing may be all over the place in terms of subject matter.
review
first and foremost, i have decided i like it. there's no denying it's well-written, thought-provoking, and can't be put down--but none of those things mean the reader has to like it--i do, though. i'm still processing it, as it was only 85 minutes ago that i turned a page and, shell-shocked, discovered there were none after it. j.k.r. said herself that people would loathe it or love it; i know i'm not the former, and that leaves only one other option that i'm quickly warming to, as the entirety of the book settles in. you get so involved in each page, each scene, and the story is so vast that you begin to forget what you've read five minutes before. i feel like my head has a mail slot on the top of it that each page is still slowly going through, and the paper inside hasn't settled down yet. i know i don't quite understand that it's over yet because i go all cross-eyed and my stomach plummets when the idea surfaces--the book is hard to put down in more ways than the physical one.
i'm feeling too, well, feel-y, to start my usual chapter by chapter, scene by scene break down i usually do, or even to start contemplating character growth, motivation, what have you.
see, after typing that i just sat here and stared at my fingers for about five minutes. i'm in a sort of fevered calm, i think. let's see. deep breath. alright. i'll start at the beginning. no, i won't, because i can't remember it clearly enough.
ah, i flipped open the book to refresh myself and now i know where to start. the dedications are in the shape of a lightning bolt. and the quotes at the beginning, that rather startled me. harry potter has always seemed to exist outside the literary world for me, a whole 'nother plane of art, so outside references kind of threw me. when you're reading about this world, you like to believe it's the real one and yours isn't. quotes kind of bring you down to earth. in fact, it almost seems penn was writing with deathly hallows in mind.
the actual book starts with snape. before this book came out, i might say something like, i will openly admit that i am a snape fan. now, at least, i can say i will, with good reason and canon behind me, proudly admit that i am a snape fan. but more on that later.
the little 'dumbledore and his henchmen at a long table with a fireplace and general darkness/evil hanging over them' bit was reread three times, twice right away, and once after i'd read the next scene. harry's first scene was so perfectly done, now that i think of it. going through his old school things to make people think of the past books, what everything has been leading up to that will now, we know, finally reach some sort of conclusion in the book we have right now. that made me dizzy.
all the information on dumbledore came very quickly, and i certainly for the first time started to look at him in a more human way. i'd never really considered his family, or his youth, because, quite frankly it seems impossible that someone with the name albus could have a youth of any kind.
so, harry's at privet drive for the last time in his life, and he's angry, as per usual. dumbledore's character has come into question. the dursleys are pissing about like idiots--or so we think. when it finally comes time for them to leave, i wanted to give dudley a hug. for the first time, in very much ever. and i would cut off a limb to know if they ever saw each other again after that moment.
the fact that hermione and ron were included in the effort to get harry safely away was kind of saddening, at least for me, because that means they're all grown up. and--
july 22nd, 12:25 pm -- okay, right there i broke off to go to work. later tonight i'm going to finish this, if i don't pass out from lack of sleep in the past couple days. x) it's unwise to stay up all night reading, then stay up the next night drinking. oi.