On 7/21/07, Gautam Mukunda <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I just finished it. I'm in San Diego, so I lost three hours due to the time > change, but just finished it. It's amazing, wonderful, deeply moving, and > not just everything I hoped for, but far more. Happy reading to all of you > still working on it!!! > > Gautam Mukunda
YAR MATEY, SPOILERS MAY BE BELOW I'm in agreement. It was action-packed, brought in all sorts of details I had hoped to see again like Ollivanders and Gregorovitch, did a decent job of persuading us how both evil and how pathetic Voldemort and his group is (effectively brought home when Harry and Dumbledore are talking on the King's Cross station and the little thing - which I take as representing the state of Voldemort's soul - keeps interrupting. It's quite nasty and sad, and for some reason during that conversation I kept on thinking about Fullmetal Alchemist and the sadness of the homunculi), and finally wound up in a reasonably epic and moving climax. Most importantly, the ending was satisfactory and didn't feel at all cheap or like a copout. I'm not 100% pleased, though. The epilogue just felt kind of silly to me; I'm still not convinced that a Ron/Hermione pairing isn't ridiculous and just forced; I feel a little gyped that Harry has a Deathly Hallow all 7 books but the first time we're given any inkling that his cloak is particularly special is basically when the senior Lovegood dismisses all other invisibility cloaks as being pathetic. (And besides, if the Deathly Hallow cloak really is so perfect at hiding, how did Dumbledore see Harry sneaking in to see the Mirror of Erised? That little incident convinced me that the cloak was useful but nothing more unusually special than other things people had like Hermione's time-travel device. I feel a little betrayed at that.) Other things didn't quite ring true either - why would Voldemort be convinced the last Horcrux would be safe inside the Room of Requirement's room for hiding things when it's so obviously full of other people's stuff, implying that there's a quite regular traffic in and out of it? Further, if knowledge of the Deathly Hallows is so widespread that a kook like the senior Lovegood, Dumbeldore, Grindelwald, and at least 2 wandmakers know about it, then how could Voldemort (the first or second greatest wizard of all time, mind you, who is absolutely obsessed with anything that influences death or could offer immortality) *not* know about it and be so foolish as to make a Hallow a Horcrux and leave it lying around? But I guess you could argue that getting the big stuff right outweighs all such small stuff. -- gwern mania 701 CTP CATO Phon-e Chicago Posse NSDM _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
