I don't think it was illogical, just not explained. What I meant to say was that I enjoyed the concept just not the execution. She should of explained how someone makes something Taboo and what its limitations are.

 

Yeah, I'm thinking this story gets an epic fail.

 

Hear hear...

Back to the topic... I wasn't expecting much from this book. I was just curious how JKR wanted to end this saga. If I were sth like 5 years younger and had never read fics supported by this forum I might have been enthralled... however I became a bit more demanding. It might be due to the fact that, as the saying goes, the apprentices have outskilled the master (at least those few of them) and the quality of stories on the net is much better than canon books (or at least than the last two).

The number of cliches is amazing... right, perhaps I am reading too much fanfiction, that might be true, however this one was overused to death: "The Battle of Hogwarts".
Come on ever since fanfictions began I've been reading about this one. Besides being overly cliched it's, IMHO, pointless. Voldemort thinks of Hogwarts as of the only place he can call home. What's more it's one of the best schooling institutions in Europe, than why destroy it and loose control over young minds?

As someone mentioned here on this forum, Dumbledore is either a Master Manipulator or just the biggest, skilled none the less, dumbass. In the end it turned out that he was the first one. Still, it's a bit anticlimatic for me. I mean, here we have Harry learning that Dumbledore was going to sacrafice him from the very beginning and still, he doesn't fell too much concerned about that.... It's just.... argh, I guess that you know what I mean

About the death count. I was kind of expecting Mad-Eye to die, I just did. However this whole business with Hedwig and Dobby... that is too much for me. On the subject of houseelves... the redemption of Kreature subplot was typical for Rowling. Still it's maddening (it's because no one was kind to him...)

And finally... Lily? James? ALBUS SEVERUS? WTF??

Oh right... I've almost forgotten... I wasn't expecting Harry to cast Crucio again or Imperious... well perhaps only a bit... But McGonagall?? To be frank, I'd be actually scared to be a wizard. Judging from this book, wizards tend to cast Imperio, Obliviate, Crucio or other mind controlling spells left and right as if they were giving candies on Halloween... The twist with Hermione erasing her parents' memory was unexpected, at least5 for me...

I wasn't expecting much from this book. Comparing it to the first four, it's rather poor, however, considering the target readers being 12-16 (I guess) it's not THAT bad.

Still, I believe that there are fanfictions that are way better than canon books...

3/5

 

Well, huh...

Got it today, finished it today.

Starting from a solid 0/5 (my expectations):

• +1 for Harry using Unforgivables at least four times
• +1 for Gringotts break in and out
• -1 for what I thought was an obvious plot hole in the first twenty minutes of reading (Hermione's "memory" business; although rereading it I see what I missed the first time)
• +1 for Gabrielle's "eyelash batting"
• +.5 for Kreacher's "redemption" (so help me, I found it funny)
• +.5 for "Merlin's Pants"
• +1 for Harry stealing three wands at once (Draco, Bellatrix, Wormtail)
• -1 for half of the Ginny references
• -1 for the other half
• +1 for Dumbles telling Snape he wanted Harry dead
• -1 for the epilogue
• +1 for Dumbledore not being perfect and chums with Grindelwald

So I guess that's about 3/5 total. Average.

-J

 

It's a bird!

It's a plane!

It's...

Spoiler

SEVERUS SNAPE!?!?!?!?!?

 

I give it 3/5 from my perspective, but as a CHILDREN'S FANTASY NOVEL the 7th book gets a 4/5.

 

just finished it. 4/5. i actually liked it. maybe its because i was going into it with zero expectation but i came out feeling good. snape has entered my books as one of the greatest badasses of all time, right next mclane. ginny stuff sucked. uber!hermione sucked. i liked dumbles and didnt despise harry. good read. im seriously not gonna put up with snape bashing any more. that may have become a kill all for stories from now on.

liked it. took it with a grain of salt and that helped a lot. there was some serious bullshit but it is harry potter. its magic, crazy mind numbing coincidences are ok for me when i accept that it is a fairy tale. dumbledore owns face. without him everything gets fucked. he may have had to step on a lot of people to do it, but he did it with some serious style, and because of him voldermort died. harry did the grunt work, but dumbles=mastermind genius.

 

Ok, isn't this section reserved for fictions only? I don't think you should post this sort of thing here, about going to the DH review thread and post your oppinions there?

 

Didn't JK plan out most of the plot before even setting out to write it? So it'd be unfair to say that she had copied bad Harry Potter fanfiction or used a lot of fanfiction cliches since she already plotted things out before the book got even published.

 

3/5

I would've given it a 4 if the Hallows weren't randomly tossed out at us. But overall, it was a pretty good book. Sure, the Epilogue was horrible as was Ron leaving and a few other parts.

Harry used a couple Unforgivables, Dumbledore does turn out to be manipulative, I swear the Snape/Lily scenes were copied out of fanfics I've read...But thanks to HBP, my standards were lowered and I actually enjoyed this one more than I thought I would. And there were a couple of humorous parts that I enjoyed, or maybe I was just slap-happy.

 

No chest monster, but it might have migrated, because he gets a funny feeling in his stomach. Presumably he was either hungry or had some sort of bug.

 

Is it just me or was it miss titled? I got the book a couple hours ago and have read through 23 chapters and so far it looks more like Hermione Granger and the Deathly Hallows. Not impressed so far I went with 2/5 and if you lot are right it will not get better

 

I'm a bit pissed that Tonks died. She was one of my favourite characters. Both her and Lupin's deaths were pointless, you don't even find out what happened, just bam, oh their dead. It was pretty useless as a plot point.

Speaking of them...does anyone else find it odd they went from barely anything at the end of HBP to married in less then a month?

Other then that, and some other things things in the book that seemed to be stolen straight from fanfic, it wasn't too bad overall. I rather liked Kreacher's little battle charge. Also though the whole George ear jokes were great.

 

Personally, I would rate it 3/5. it is a whole lot better then Half-Baked Plot but not as outstanding as the Goblet of Fire. That is not including the ending...

If including the end, 2/5. Ginny, 'nuff said.

Overall it is a good to read, not a must-read.

 

This was much better than I thought it would be. I loved the way Dumbledore wasn't portrayed as perfect in this book as that was the #2 worst issue I had with the books before. The #1 being how Harry doesn't actually have any skill in the books. After this book, the Dumbledore thing is cleared up, but obviously the top thing I hate about the books remains. That, the epilouge, and Ginny are what prompted me to go down to a 3/5. The thing with Mrs. Weasley and Bellatrix made me laugh my ass off so that didn't bother me much.

Harry's (and McGonagall's) use of the unforgivables rocked, and the thing with Kreature was stupid, but I could stand it. The whole thing with Snape was stupid as well, but again I don't hate Snape as much as most of the people around here seem to. I always felt a bit sorry for him which this book rather reinforced-fuck, Dumbledore was an asshole.

It would bother me that Draco got off scot free, but in this book he really comes off as totally and completely pathetic so that's enough for it to not matter much to me.

It did piss me off that she killed off Dobby and Fred though. I always liked those two characters. So overall 3/5.

 

The action was great, but that's it.

The "Deathly Hallows" stuff was retcon bullshit: WTF, super-cloak? And how was Dumbledore supposed to have out-duelled Grindlewald's "unbeatable" Elder Wand?

And the diadem horcrux? Humbug. It's like she rooted through the first few books looking for things she could claim ex post facto as "foreshadowing".

Snape's story (What, he was Good All Along? You don't say!) was sad, so very sad. I tend to hate fanon!Snape, but still, the depth of his character in fanfiction puts the canon version to shame. Instead of anything approaching two-dimensionality, it turns out that his only motivation, his entire life, was his maladjusted puppy-love crush on Lily?

I was annoyed at book six for wrecking my beloved HMS Honks, but did she really need to burn the wreckage to the ground with a superfluous pregnancy subplot?

The epilogue... words cannot express.

Also: just a quick shout out to the fine folks at Bloomsbury. I really love how you made the Australian edition 604 pages long instead of the 768 pages the US got. I especially love how you accomplished this by not having any margins around the text. It's really great. Typography, bitch, have you heard of it?

 

So... it turns out Neville was the badass hero of the series all along? At least that part of the book was enjoyable.

 

Neville is my new favorite canon character. Canon Harry can eat shit and die. Canon Neville as of Book 7 is, in the words of mightygodking, fucking hardcore.

Poor Voldemort. He got his ass killed by a stupid kid with ungodly luck, some weirdo magical items (introduced with no build-up in the previous six books, except for the cloak, which is apparently retconned into a super-cloak), and a super-intelligent best friend (new theory, Hermione is a proto-Pretender), instead of the kickass, defiant, fuck-yourself-Voldemort, completely-owns-everyone-else-in-Hogwarts Neville.

 

I agree with your points on Harry but I couldn't stand Neville in this one. I kept on thinking of that blond kid in La Resistance in the South Park movie. I found it too corny.