I liked it lots and lots. There are things I wish she'd tweaked slightly, and it felt like Harry and Hermione were in that tent forever, but on the whole I'm happy. Even with the cheesy epilogue! I like that Harry endured all this suffering and comes out of it mostly whole, and that he gets to be happy. As of the end of Order of the Phoenix, I didn't see how he could survive intact, the PTSD was getting so bad, so her shift in tone with HBP got my hopes up. And then she fulfilled them.
The shift in tone, do you mean Harry's attitude in HBP?
For the epilogue, I just feel like there are still so many unanswered questions about Harry's future... and sure, we can all make them up, but I still want to know where she thinks Harry is today, aside from married to Ginny and with 3 kids. I figured if he lived he'd have kids with Ginny so that really didn't answer any of my "Where are they now?" questions.
Most of the mad hate-on the Internet had for the book was generated by spoiler lovers who saw the leaked book and skipped right to the end. There are a few things with the book itself that weren't liked, but for the most part the anger was over an epilogue that summed exactly nothing up, other than everybody having poorly named children.
Among the people who were not spoiled and read the book front-to-back rather than starting with the last page, I've seen most people be pretty happy with the book. (Except, again, the epilogue and places where the story was twisted to fit the epilogue that was outdated which she shouldn't have been married to.)
I was extremely disappointed. After the role he played in OotP and HBP, I was expecting a bigger part for Snape in this book---but it's like he was completely forgotten, and she just threw in a 'post-script' chapter to explain everything about him at the end of the book, as an afterthought. His death was incredibly anticlimactic compared to what I'd imagined would happen.
I was surprised about Hedwig too. It just seemed unnecessary. I understood completely that with Harry out of Hogwarts, he had no need for an owl any longer but it really seemed like JKR was stretching to shock people in this book; every battle, every skirmish, every run-in with Death Eaters or Voldemort had to end with somebody dying or something similarly shocking (srsly, an ear? bah). A lot of people are complaining that this book is written like the tomes of fanfiction that have followed in the series' wake, and in many cases, I agree.
I did very much miss Snape's presence... but as I had figured that most of the book would be the trio wandering around for Horcruxes, I didn't expect him to be in it much. What I didn't expect was his whole explanation to be given in a penseive. I had guessed that Voldemort would kill him, but I was hoping that it would at least be in some sort of battle... I wanted to see Snape duel with Harry
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... and it's very typical of her to explain everything in the last 40 pages I didn't mind her wrapping it up at the end, although I would very much have liked seeing more of Snape and what was going on at Hogwarts than we did - one of the disadvantages of telling these stories entirely from Harry's POV, I suppose. But the place she put it in - wrapping up the Snape storyline in the middle of the battle sequence? The more I think about it, the more I think that I she had decided to make the wrapup with Snape an afterthought at the end of the book, which it ended up becoming, then surely there was a better place to put that. Even after the battle would have been better. I found it a bit of stretch, in terms of suspension of disbelief, that in the middle of a battle with all of his friends dying, Harry would take a time-out to run up to the Headmaster's study to look at Snape's memories. Surely any sane person would have tucked it in their pocket for later and continue the battle. When I read that, I actually stopped and said, "WTF
I think that's a reason why I always feel like the exposition is so poorly handled, since it's from such a limited POV, the only real way Harry, and thus us, can find out information is if someone actually tells him, which then tends to turn into the long, almost siligoquey. Not that I find these poorly written or uninteresting, I just wish I didn't have to happen so much. I think she sort of ending up backing herself into a corner with the POV (which I think she realized in book 4, when she started having to open books with a scene that wasn't in Harry's POV), but there are also a lot of good advantages for us to know Harry better with the POV she chose
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For the epilogue, I just feel like there are still so many unanswered questions about Harry's future... and sure, we can all make them up, but I still want to know where she thinks Harry is today, aside from married to Ginny and with 3 kids. I figured if he lived he'd have kids with Ginny so that really didn't answer any of my "Where are they now?" questions.
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Among the people who were not spoiled and read the book front-to-back rather than starting with the last page, I've seen most people be pretty happy with the book. (Except, again, the epilogue and places where the story was twisted to fit the epilogue that was outdated which she shouldn't have been married to.)
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I was surprised about Hedwig too. It just seemed unnecessary. I understood completely that with Harry out of Hogwarts, he had no need for an owl any longer but it really seemed like JKR was stretching to shock people in this book; every battle, every skirmish, every run-in with Death Eaters or Voldemort had to end with somebody dying or something similarly shocking (srsly, an ear? bah). A lot of people are complaining that this book is written like the tomes of fanfiction that have followed in the series' wake, and in many cases, I agree.
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I didn't mind her wrapping it up at the end, although I would very much have liked seeing more of Snape and what was going on at Hogwarts than we did - one of the disadvantages of telling these stories entirely from Harry's POV, I suppose. But the place she put it in - wrapping up the Snape storyline in the middle of the battle sequence? The more I think about it, the more I think that I she had decided to make the wrapup with Snape an afterthought at the end of the book, which it ended up becoming, then surely there was a better place to put that. Even after the battle would have been better. I found it a bit of stretch, in terms of suspension of disbelief, that in the middle of a battle with all of his friends dying, Harry would take a time-out to run up to the Headmaster's study to look at Snape's memories. Surely any sane person would have tucked it in their pocket for later and continue the battle. When I read that, I actually stopped and said, "WTF
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