Slacks for Ella Funt

I wasn’t a big fan of the early books of the series. I read the first three because I was working in bookstores at the time and needed to know what this Harry Potter was about. Someone gave me a copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but I never got around to reading it and finally read it right before Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix came out. I liked Goblet of Fire much better and went ahead and read Order of the Phoenix, which then became my favorite book of the series. So for me, it was less a good series of 7 books than a good series of 4 books.
In Deathly Hallows, Rowling finally departs from the school year structure that structures the rest of the books in the series, with the trip to school at the beginning, Christmas in the middle, and the end of term at the end of the book. Harry, Hermione, and Ron have dropped out of school on the run, looking for the horcruxes which hold fragments of Voldemorts soul. The middle of the book is mostly them apparating from one camping spot to the next, arguing with each other and hiding from Voldemort. I think I might be the only person who liked this part—lots of Hermione and Ron, both of whom I like. At the end of the book, they return to Hogwarts (yea!) for a final showdown with Voldemort and his Death Eaters. This is when things got less interesting, I thought. Obviously, all our favorite supporting characters were there and fighting, and we occasionally get snippets of them. But mostly we’re stuck with Harry, as he inexplicably spends a good chunk of the battle with his head in the pensieve and then heads out to face down Voldemort.
I’ve always found Harry to be the least interesting character in the whole series and the end of book showdowns with Voldemort to be pretty anticlimactic. Rowling doesn’t handle the epic struggle between the hero and his evil opponent as well as Pullman or Alexander. And in this book, I couldn’t follow the magic-logic that allowed Harry to destroy Voldemort at all.
Hurray that Neville got to kill the snake and that Molly Weasley took out Bellatrix Lestrange, but all in all, I would have liked to see more of the supporting characters and less of Harry/Voldemort.
Worst of all, the book ends with an epilogue set some years in the future. Apparently, Rowling wrote it very early on in the writing of the series, and it shows. All it really tells us is that everyone now has kids who are going to Hogwarts, and they all seem pretty dull. Nothing about their careers, or what the wizarding world is like without Voldemort.
So all in all, not a bad end to the series. Far from my favorite installment (which is the darkly political Order of the Phoenix), it’s still an improvement over the earliest books in the series.