More on Potter
In practice, this meant that long stretches of Deathly Hallows-almost 400 of the book's 759 pages-are spent with no one but Harry, Ron, Hermione and whomever they meet while on the run from Voldemort and in search of the Horcruxes. And when more than half your book is spent in tents with three heroic but desperate teens, you're left little time for the thorough resolution of a score of other characters' stories.
Why, for example, would Rowling-knowing how compelling and divisive a character she'd created in Snape-give us only a fleeting moment in which the doomed spy encounters Harry himself? Why would she tell the rich story of Snape's love of Lily-one of the few things I guessed right, incidentally-through a flood of Pensieve memories, the book equivalent of the Keyser Söze montage at the end of The Usual Suspects? And is my sense of story old-fashioned because I wish that she'd allowed Snape the chance to actively redeem himself, not through an early death, but through some dramatic action at the moment of highest crisis?
http://www.slate.com/id/2170647/entry/2170724/