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08/06/2005 Archived Entry: "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince"

HAVING JUST FINISHED HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE, I think Dave Kopel's onto something (HUGE spoilers!). Despite appearances, Snape is still not in the service of Voldemort.

The appeal of the Potter books is mystifying. They're sometimes derivative and maddeningly slow-developing. In the current book Rowling commits the dramatic sin of "monologuing" (in this case actually, dialoging)on the part of a bad guy during a climactic scene. But man, what a master storyteller that woman is! All these thousands of pages and she's never left a single thread dangling loose. Tiny seeds in earlier books blossom in later ones. A detail that seems off or inconsistant later turns out to have a perfectly logical explanation.

That can be a hard, hard, hard to do for the length of one book -- let alone six very large books. Can't wait to read #7.

Posted by Claire @ 08:34 AM CST
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