Spoilers galore. Highlight to read.
So, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I’m not sure what to make of Snape killing Dumbledore, as well as Malfoy actually being a Death Eater-in-training. Despite the fact that the formula of the series (see link here) is “Harry spends a few hundred pages being told he’s wrong, but then in the end it turns out that he’s right and everybody else is wrong,” I STILL thought they were just hitting the whole “Snape is still a Death Eater and Draco’s up to no good! Seriously! Listen!” thing too hard for it to be totally borne out–esp. when Harry’s obsession with Draco’s supposed malfeasance starts distracting him from the supposedly more important mission regarding Slughorn’s memory that Dumbledore had assigned him. But lo and behold, Harry is once again shown to be right and everyone else was wrong to have doubted him. I can’t tell if this is supposed to be taken at face value or not–if the former, then to be frank the writing is a little weak. But then I’ve always thought that about these books. I mean, the big prophecy that we spend the whole last book trying to figure out is that Harry and Voldemort are bound by fate to confront each other, and one will destroy the other? No shit, Sherlock! (see link here)
I was also disappointed that it was Dumbledore who bought it, because you could see it coming from about 100 miles away. Gee, you mean the wise old wizard who’s been Harry’s guide for the past six years has been slain and now Harry will be forced to stand alone and confront his nemesis with nothing but his own courage? Who’d’a thunk it? I was guessing/hoping that she’d kill Ron or Hermione, but oh well.
What was up with Cho being on the back cover, but barely in the book at all? That made me think it was Cho who was going to be killed–purely a fake-out?
I must admit I spent the entire book thinking Harry must be mildly retarded for not figuring out that the Half-Blood Prince was Voldemort, who he’d just seen had a muggle for a dad and a witch for a mom, and whose career at Hogwarts he’d been watching through the Penseive. But it turned out to be a total fakeout and it was Snape all along. I kinda felt like there wasn’t enough info supporting the “it’s Snape” angle to justify that total a fakeout. I’ve made this point before (a little louder that time, admittedly), but a good twist reveals clues that had been there all along under your nose, which you can then go back and say “Man, how could I have been so BLIND???”; a bad one just blindsides you. This one gave you a whole lot of information to support one theory and then pulled it all out from under you and said “nope, it’s really this other guy!” I guess you could note that since Snape was the potions teacher, he probably was a potions prodigy, but I still think it was sort of weak.
Still, it was fun to read, and it’s the kind of book you plow through (if only to avoid getting it spoiled!). I thought Rowling had some really nice prose in this one, esp. the bit about the “hard, blazing look” Ginny gave Harry right before they kissed for the first time–that was a really unexpected, and yet apt, turn of phrase.
What did people make of the chapter called “The Cave,” or as I like to call it “The J.R.R. Tolkien Tribute Concert”? This was certainly the most Tolkien-heavy book in the series overall–even the prose got Tolkienesque at times, particularly in the last few pages–but this chapter alone had allusions to Gollum’s cave, the Dead Marshes, the Watcher in the Water, the Paths of the Dead, the Mirror of Galadriel, Weathertop, the Bridge of Khazad-Dum, the Window on the West, and probably even more that I’m forgetting. Meanwhile all of Dumbledore’s soliloquies regarding Voldemort’s past read like excerpts from “The Shadow of the Past” and “The Council of Elrond.” After watching her dance around the influence for five books, it was intriguing to see Rowling dive in head-first on the sixth.
And how about that Spider-Man movie ending, with Harry breaking up with Ginny “for her own good”? Many comics critics hate the whole “my superherodom causes the women in my life to suffer–how awful for me!” thing because it uses the suffering of women as a means toward supposedly making the men more interesting, rather than treating women as people in their own right for whom their own suffering means more than a character-building exercise for the super-men in their lives–but now here’s the biggest author in the world, who happens to be a woman, doing the exact same thing!