I need to start blogging again, and Harry Potter 7 (spoilers follow!) is as good an excuse as any -- especially when it was so disappointing. Not that I didn't enjoy reading it; there certainly was a lot of payoff, and I particularly loved the insight into and tweaking of Dumbledore. But the line-by-line writing was the clunkiest of the big books (especially in the middle section), the ending seemed contrived and inelegant, and the characters for whom I most wanted to see big payoffs were either ignored or mishandled.
Ron and Hermione in particular didn't have much opportunity to shine in the end (even in the epilogue!). Ginny was mostly out of the picture, despite her closeness with Harry and that provocative earlier brush with Voldemort. And of course the biggest single disappointment of the book was the lack of any kind of confrontation between Harry and Snape. Their connection, so well handled in the first six books, had great potential for some kind of redemptive, sacrificing act; instead, Snape dies over a technicality that's introduced in the last book without even getting a chance to engage Harry directly. And then why is his story relayed through the pensieve after the last book set up the ideas of occlumency and legilmency so well?
Anyway I don't think it ruins the series, and in a lot of ways the magical-technicality-laden ending was to be expected after the other books (which, by the way, I'm quite fond of). But I at least was hoping that ultimately the arc would be artless and transparent, and so I was disappointed.
MORE: J.K. Rowling reveals even more about what happens in the Potterverse after the end of book 7.
What you said.
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