4/26/10
Dear classmates,
I read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling. It is about a brave seventeen-year-old boy named Harry Potter and his friends, Ron and Hermione, trying to destroy the infamous killer named Lord Voldemort. I would give this book an eight and a half out of ten because of its good cliff-hangars, details, and action. Even with this it did have its downsides like the humongous death toll and the length of the book was just tremendous. Even with the bad parts I still thought this was a great book.
I would say that the genre of this book is fantasy because of all of the magical things that occur in the book. Lots of magic happened in this book so I will start with spells. First of all every wizard is given a wand at a certain age so they can cast spells that can do various things like clean your room, heal cuts, disarm people, and even kill. There is a spell for just about everything in Harry’s world. There are also potions that can do things like that when you drink them. There are also magical creatures in the book like dragons, giants, fairies, goblins, centaurs, and much more fairy tale creatures. Even though I don’t usually read fantasy books I thought this one was really good.
I don’t get why the author made such a huge death toll in this book. Almost every main character died. I mean even Harry’s pet owl died! Throughout the book everyone Harry meets dies. This is not only very sad but also pretty predictable. I guess J.K. Rowling did this to show how much Harry had to suffer to meet his goal of killing Voldemort.
I like the way the author made the epilogue. I always liked when books had epilogues because it is a chance to see what happened to the characters after the resolution. I especially liked this one because it had dialogue in it not just the narrarator just telling you about it like in most books. I thought this was a very good strategy because it was like another chapter in the book just set nineteen years in the future. I thought that this was a great way to end this very good book.
I was interested in the fact that the world Harry lives in is a magical one. Who wouldn’t want to cure sickness, mend wounds, make their bed, and clean their room with just a flick of a wand? It is amazing to think evenhow something like that would even work. A wand is pretty much just a stick, how would that be magical? Although there are many upsides to this power people like Lord Voldemort and his minions called Death Eaters abuse it by torturing and killing thousands of people. This was just one of the many things that fascinated me through out the book.
I was surprised when Harry found out that he had to die in order to kill Voldemort. At the end of the book Harry found out that part of Voldemort’s soul lived inside of him and in order to get rid of it he had to die. Here is when he found out, “And while a fragment of his soul, unmissed by Voldemort, remains attached and protected by Harry, Lord Voldemort can’t die”… “So the boy… the boy must die”, I thought this to be very surprising because, not only because he is the main character, I just read seven long books to find out that he had to die and someone else had to kill Voldemort. He did end up coming back to life and killed Voldemort though. That is one of the things that I thought where astonishing.
The resolution to the main characters problem was really short. I was expecting some huge showdown at the end between Harry and Voldemort but it only lasted two sentences! Here is the whole battle, “Harry heard the high shriek as he yelled his best hope to the heavens, pointing Draco’s wand: Avada Kedavra! Expelliarmus! Harry saw Voldemort’s green jet meet his own spell, saw the Elder Wand fly high, dark against the sunrise, spinning across the enchanted ceiling like the head of Nagini spinning through the air toward the master who it would not kill, who had come to take full possession of it at last.” That was it just two sentences. I thought this to be very disappointing; I thought it was going to be half of a chapter. Well, I guess being 759 pages long this book was long enough already. That is that is what I thought of the resolution of the characters problem.
In conclusion I thought this book was very good despite the huge death toll and the disappointing battle. It still had great detail, a great ending, and lots of action. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was a good read and I am glad to have finished the Harry Potter series.
Sincerely,
Grant Taylor
