Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: A

The wonders of a great book are many, but rarely encountered; once discovered, these novels are difficult if not impossible to put down. You race and race through the pages, eyes glued to the page while the dawn approaches and you start to smell alittle like the stuff in the back of your fridge. But more than that you leap backwards and forwards over the pages, the prose, and the plot - savoring the rarely seen magnificence of a great writer turning their genius into brilliant art. This is, in more or less a small paragraph, how I felt while reading J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - a big, cathartic rush of a tale bursting with satisfaction. The achievements of Rowling's creation will be espoused about at length below but what stands monumentally to all first & foremost is her endurance in imagination; that after seven (seven!) books about a teenage wizard, she remains as she was from the start: a storyteller of breathtaking skill underscored always by her wry, bleak, mirthful intelligence.

But let us start from the beginning of this final chapter (while also trying to dodge spoiling even a tad of the unspooling events). Lord Voldemort, the serpentine spector hovering as the Big Bad for all of the series, marshals his armies still - his coming storm growing more nefarious and lethal by the day. His plans, something woven together by Rowling from Hitler to Vader, march ceaselessly onward from the very first chapter of the book; his malevolence present on nearly every page. From the opening flight to the Burrow to the triumphant return to Hogwarts at the end, the Dark Lord is there. Yet the darkening disaster that He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named represents has a flaw...the Boy Who Lived - (a nearly grown) Harry Potter.

Harry still seeks the Horcruxes and he still travels with his best friends, Hermione and Ron. That his search for the dark artifacts protecting Voldemort's soul is intensely enthralling while rarely cheery is a major accomplishment; that Hermione and Ron grower deeper, more lovable as time goes on remains another; and that Harry himself has grown from symbolic savior to bedraggled teen and back again is perhaps the crowning jewel of the book. Except to say that I'd also have to discount the vivid duels, battles, escapes, break-ins, pacts, plans, and dragon flights that also occur. To say that Deathly Hallows is a narrative with a lot going for it would be an understatement; if average novels were a meal, here you will find a feast.

This extends as well to the author's keen mind and wry wit. It is and always has been a delicious treat to watch her prose scintillate with such droll humor and in her latest, though lacking much of Dolores Umbridge (much...but not all!), she rattles off more than enough deliciously dark quips and quotes to satisfy any reader looking for a laugh (though the irony of one coming here, a grand political allegory and adventure saga, for humor is almost too much to bear).

All joking aside, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is an emotionally-stirring, masterful piece of fiction and Rowling its emotionally-stirring, masterful creator. The myriad loose ends of her tale are wrapped up with minimal effort; the expected "explanations" given vivid sprucing up when they occur during oh, say, a trip down the last memory lane you'd expect. To top it all off, the final pages tell not of that climactic showdown we've waited nearly 10 years for but of the aftermath; and let it be known that this boldly domestic, even quiet, epilogue marks a perfect ending to a perfect story - one, as they say, for the ages. In the end it is with great sadness that I depart from Rowling's world yet it is with still greater joy that I think back upon it; upon a spell of happiness and wonder that breaks not even to this day.