Book Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

We all knew it was coming: the end of Harry Potter. The final chapter in his saga is an interesting story. For a while, I kept confusing Harry Potter with Frodo from the Lord of the Rings since there are surprising similarities; lots of travel running from the enemy, lots of encounters with evildoers, a quest, and other general hardship. Even the end had a similar feel, at least to me, to the ending of LOTR.

This is not to say that this HP is a rip off of LOTR, in fact, these elements are common in fantasy writing and probably make everyone think such works are LOTR rip offs! However, there is enough uniquely HP to make the story clearly its own. In some ways, this HP is a witch's brew of all the HP series brought to a nice boil in a cauldron over a hot fire. Almost everything that occurred and all the people from the previous stories is mentioned or makes an appearance. Of course, when a writer is ending the series, you have to tie up all the loose ends (unless you want to leave the door open for future work).

The ending of this series wasn't that much of a surprise. Of my major predictions of what would happen, several were dead on, one was almost right, one was wrong. Not bad. Despite my good predictions, there was several elements I didn't predict. I wont get into details too much, but suffice to say that all these kinds of events have serious consequences. (This is what I like about the new Doctor Who series, his companions leaving for travels in the TARDIS can leave hardship and heartbreak for those left behind). Just who lives and dies at the end of this series, well, you'll just have to read it yourself.

If you like HP, you should wrap up the series with this book. If you're a younger reader, you might want to wait a bit.