Within a few daze of the book coming out, I finished it. I won’t reveal any secrets (like Hermione being a boy – or was that “The Crying Game”?) and I won’t tell how it ends (but Harry and Voldemort plummeting over Reichenbach Falls was riveting). What I will do is outline my biggest complaints about the whole series

Editing
At least “Deathly Hallows” is the first one of these since “Azkaban” that I didn’t honestly feel could have been half the length. But it is clear to me that between the rush to print and the superstar qualities of JK Rowling, she doesn’t get her stuff edited worth a damn. I opened at random to page 353 and got this clinker of a sentence;

“He soon discovered it and read greedily, but became lost: it was necessary to go further back to make sense of it all, and eventually he found himself at the start of a chapter entitled ‘The Greater Good’.”

Nearly every page has one like this. This book was hardly edited, if at all. There’s never an excuse for this. I don’t care if you’re Joanne Rowling or Erik Hare or Carl Hiaasen, you need to have your stuff edited.

Adolescence = Death
From Harry Potter to Don McLean’s “American Pie” (yes, I understand it) coming of age tales are usually about death. It’s a Garden of Eden thing, and here we have it complete with snakes. Why doesn’t someone write a story of adolescence as an awakening? (I did.) I realize that the West is heavily Christian, but the fixation on that one part of the Bible simply troubles me. Growing up is exciting and all about coming alive.

Authorial Omniscience
I wrote about this just last week. The perspective where the author has everything in their universe at their beck and call is a dangerous one. The more the author tries to explain everything and force every character to do their bidding, the more they write themselves into a corner. In Harry Potter, where it’s all about death, the problem is that examining all aspects of death raises questions that have to be answered. The plot has to stop for a while, in this case a whole chapter, for this narrative. Despite all of this explanation I still don’t understand the portraits and how they talk.

Covering too much ground is the same as not covering anything. It’s better to let the reader fill in the details, and this is best done when the perspective is not one of an author who is God but a character stuck in the middle of the mayhem.

That’s all I’m going to complain about today. At least I can get some sleep now, knowing that I’ve finished the books and made my snide comments.