Spoiler-Free Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Review
I just spent about nearly 12 of the last 18 hours reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, having picked up my copy at the big midnight book-release party at Barnes and Noble.

I had high expectations. The book did not dissapoint.

The previous book (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) ended with the promise of a big war on the horizon. The new one picks up only days later, with the little calm before the storm, and then kicks into high gear in chapter 4, and rarely lets up before the final chapter. As a war story, it's pretty violent (for a Harry Potter book). There's torture and death - and not always with clean spellcasting, either.

There's also even more shades of gray than in any of the previous books. The good guys are far from perfect, and the not all of the bad guys are perfectly evil, either.

It's my new favorite.

As far as the Harry Potter release party - it was tiring, but was one of those experiences I wanted to have once - and let my kids enjoy once. Since this was the last book of the series, I doubt there'll be another event around the release of a piece of literature in my lifetime. Though I can certainly hope. There were tons of people in costume - mostly kids, but many adults were getting in on the action. I was wearing my Cloning Clyde t-shirt, which earned one comment from a young guy walking past me that "THAT GAME ROCKS!!!"

I started right off, after picking up my wristband to guarantee my place in line after midnight, encountering one guy sitting in the "Role Playing Game" corner of the bookstore reading to his baby daughter, who was next to him in a stroller. The book he was reading from was a Dungeons & Dragons manual. In very soft and comforting storytelling tones, he was describing details of a certain power forcing a morale-based saving throw. We struck up a conversation, and he told me about a new gaming store that recently opened that I was unaware of. We chatted for a little while, before I had to go check up on my kids.

I went around the store finding and trying to answer Harry Potter trivia questions, and found out my Trivia-Fu wasn't quite as strong about Harry Potter as I expected. The kids got to enjoy balloon animals, face-and-arm painting (many children wanted death-marks on their forearms). I guess it was a bad sign that one of the main prizes was the chance to move up to the front of the line.

The girls got really tired right after 11:00, and we were astonished by the size of the line. Even our guaranteed spot (getting there just as the party started) ended up taking us well over an hour before we could pick up our book.

Still, it was pretty fun, and I ended up picking up a guitar book and a programming book on ASP.NET while I waited. But I do not feel like our family missed out on anything missing the book-release parties for the previous books...
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:00 PM (Permalink)