Finished Reading Harry Potter.

So I just finished reading this on Saturday evening. I know it is a kids book and there is all kinds of hype about it... but I thought I may as well read it right away to lessen the chance that someone would spoil it for me by giving away the end or something.

My spoiler-free opinion of the book? It was OK, better than the last couple, but still not as good as #4 which I think was about the best of the lot. I don't think that J.K. Rowling is really breaking any ground with her story telling style or the actual details of the HP plot, but it was a fun enough read.

I had a lot of predictions about what was going to happen based on the last book and I think I was mostly wrong. I had the right idea about the direction in the vaguest of ways, but the details were certainly different to anything I would have predicted.

The biggest problem I have with the HP books in general is pacing and this one suffers from it again. The characters always seem to drag their feet and take a long time doing the things I am not so interested in, and then when the story gets to a point where I want some juicy details, it blows by in a page or two. This happened yet again with this book and I found that the beginning (chapter 3 onwards,) took a little too long to get going... then the end was over pretty quick. The epliogue in particular was a let down, I really would have liked to see some more detail there.

All in all it was a decent end to a series that I have mostly enjoyed. I don't know if I would ever bother with another book by J.K. Rowling that was not a Harry Potter one, but if she wrote something else taking place in the same universe, I would probably give it a try.