the Dalaverse

I obtained my copy at 1:30 this morning and, after the necessary interruptions of sleep and work, have just finished it. I don't have many coherent thoughts, but I wanted to get out a few things before I seek out other opinions.


Firstly (and I admit this could just be a knee-jerk reaction, to which I am prone) I thought it was much better than OotP. Tighter, more focused, better paced, and less...bloated. I think it could be my favorite after PoA. The secondary and tertiary characters were really well-utilized -- in the past, and sometimes with too many pages at her disposal for the particular story she was telling, I've felt that Rowling overused some of them and their individual quirkinesses became annoying. In HPB, however, everything seemed perfectly balanced. I wasn't even distracted by the brief appearances of Grawp, and I thought that subplot was one of OotP's biggest drawbacks.

Harry is maturing nicely and believably. As I was going through the book I was a bit annoyed to see him operating under a lot of the same faults he's always had without learning from his mistakes, but I was extremely satisfied by his demeanor at the end, which was so vastly and rightfully different from end-of-OotP-Harry.

Harry's/Rowling's further exploration of how Tom Riddle became Lord Voldemort was fascinating.

The Hermione/Ron was, I thought, handled very well, with just enough insight into what was going on beyond Harry's POV that it seemed to progress pretty naturally. And I also found myself warming to Harry/Ginny. Their breakup affected me more than I would have guessed. I always liked Ginny, I suppose. I've seen her dismissed as the author's own Mary Sue, but honestly, Hermione is not the only female who is allowed to be interesting. Ginny was brought out of her single dimension by Harry's changing perception of her, which as she explains at the end was the result of her own growing up and maturing. Besides which, look at all her brothers (with the exception of Percy) -- how could that child not end up cool?

I suppose I should mention, for those of you who only know me from PotC, that HP was the second fandom for which I wrote. And I was a H/D shipper, and my writing, it was terrible. I haven't written anything HP in almost two years, and now the appeal of that 'ship kind of puzzles me (even though I was vastly amused by the line about Harry being obsessed with Draco Malfoy). If I had to name an OTP, it would be Ron/Hermione closely followed by Remus/Sirius. I never wrote the latter because I never felt like I had a grasp of the characters, but it was as canon as Lily/James to me. The Tonks/Lupin thus came out of nowhere because I was looking so hard for any glimmer of R/S. I'm still not sure how I feel about it, but I did take Remus gazing sadly into the fire at Christmas as a shipper shout-out.

And then, of course, we have The Death. I'm totally crap at speculating on plot, any plot, even in children's literature -- I'm just not the type of reader to sit there and ponder what will happen before it's actually happening. I might have a glancing thought here and there, but I tend to second-guess myself to the point of exhaustion, and I'd rather know for sure anyway. So overall, I didn't think much about who would be the next to die. I had a brief idea it might be Ginny when Harry smelled the flowery Burrow scent in the love potion, but then I stopped concentrating on it.

That being said, the moment Dumbledore asked Harry to come on their final mission, I was absolutely certain it would be him. It makes sense for it to happen now rather than OotP, particularly given the interaction between Dumbledore and Harry throughout the book (and man, is that ever going to be tough to reread). So it wasn't a great shock (although I had practically forgotten about Snape, so that totally walloped me upside the head). I didn't cry until Harry had to tell Hagrid, and then I cried through to the end (loved the funeral, btw -- Rowling sidestepping the issue of religion again, which makes me happy).

Hmmm. I suppose I had more thoughts than I, er, thought.

Anyway. I doubt I'll be a great source of meta in the days to follow, but this has certainly reawakened my interest in the fandom, so I'm itching to read some. I might even venture into reading fic again.