Brian DePalma Will Have to Make the Movie

First of all, if you have not read Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, DO NOT continue to read this post unless you do not care about spoilers. This will be your only warning, don't come crying to me if your fun gets ruined.



Here, have a little extra space, so the stuff doesn't show up on the front page when the blog loads.




To quote Harry, "Glad we got that straightened out".

Four hours of escapist reading-- and frankly, there isn't much out there that actually makes me stop worrying about law school and finances for more than two minutes at a time-- and all I can think to myself is "Whoa." I would like to take a moment to congratulate myself on one correctly spotted plot prediction. I'm not patting myself too hard on the back because, frankly, any one with a passing familiarity with the epic adventure/quest genre should have made by the end of book three. But, holy schlamoly, I did not see Snape coming. And this one is sooo dark. So violent. Not gratuitously so, but still, the new curses, the Inferi, the ending battle, and lots of little bits in between take this firmly out of the realm of children's literature, much more so than even Order of the Phoenix, which I would have placed in the YA section more for the complexity of its underlying themes than for violence. Hulio and I went for lunch before I left town today and two young boys came in clutching their copies, bookmarked toward the front of the book and I wanted to run up and tell their mother not to let them read it, they're too young! But of course, that was too lunatic, even for me, so I'm only blogging about it.

Unanswered questions for me, based on my one reading (and I'm sure I'll come up with more as I re-read slowly now):

*What is up with Trelawny constantly wandering the castle reading omens from the cards? I doubt that J.K. Rowling threw that in just for creepy effect (although it is a highly effective way to creep someone out), but I just can't figure out what that is supposed to mean.

*Malfoy-- redeemable? Regretting his decision to follow Voldemort? Or just too coward to kill? Why did he go to cry to Moaning Myrtle of all people/ghosts?

*Why don't they EVER listen to Hermione? "There are some curses that are unbreakable, some poisons with no antidotes".

And some random commentary:

* LOVE the fact that Tom Riddle showed sociopathic tendancies as a child (killing the rabbit). Makes it so much more complex that he's not just "carried away", if you will, sort of explains why he's more evil than your average bad wizard.

*Not so enamored of the Harry-Ginny pairing, at least not as presented in this book. Willing to wait to see what happens next before passing judgement. Love the Remus/Tonks pairing. Love the hormonal teenagers.

*Interesting that, for all the Weasley parents talk about Harry as being part of the family, they never write to him at Hogwarts.

*Also interesting that Voldemort as a physical being in the present tense of the book never shows up, even once. We see him only as a memory.

*J.K. Rowling is amazing at bringing things that were little details back to mean big things.

*Loved the scene where Harry meets the Minister of Magic.

*Continuing, despite the whole Snape thing (though Alan Rickman will be DELICIOUS playing evil Snape-- He can Avada Kadavera me any day, rrrrrow!), to enjoy the fact that J.K. Rowling continues to give us unsavory characters who are still "good", and well-meaning people who are still "bad". Rufus Scrimgeour may not be as openly antagonistic to Harry as Fudge, but he's not exactly looking out for Harry's best interests, either. And ol' Sluggy is odious and obnoxious, but nominally on the side of the light. Even if he's there out of self-interest, he's still there. It's good for the soul to realize that good and evil are almost never black and white.

*Major turning points for Harry: not rising to Snape's bait as they walk up to the school, coming to an understanding of how and why Voldemort is bound by the prophecy but he himself is not, Dumbledore telling Harry that he knows he's safe because he's with Harry (which made me cry, by the way).

So, I'm going to re-read the book and maybe I'll post about predictions for the final book. My only complaint about this one? I wish it had been longer. But then, I would say that if it were 652,000 pages, so...