: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Author: J. K. Rowling
Well, after years of waiting, the seventh book is finally published. It’s a big book and took me just over a week to read it. Now I’m sad because I’ll have to wait for years for the next one!
I don’t want to make this a review of the book; that’s not the purpose of my comments. I’m here to record my impressions, the aspects I found significant to me. In that sense, I found I was less impressed with the plot and the conclusion in this one. While Rowling does her usual excellent job of dotting all the i’s and crossing the t’s, connecting all the plot points, this book ends without Potter really doing anything heroic to stop He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Instead, it’s Dumbledore who saves the day. While it makes sense in the context of the book, it’s just not as satisfying as the previous novels. The bulk of the book is also quite depressing: Hogwarts is taken over by a horrible politician who has an evil agenda and is cruel to all our favorite characters, which makes for glum reading. While Rowling does keep funny things happening and the mystery makes things entertaining, this book is my least favorite of the series. That said, Rowling does an excellent job of preparing us for the battle and war to come in the future books. By the end of this one, it’s obvious that the kids are not kids any more, and the conflicts upcoming will be serious ones involving death and mayhem, not just mild magical maladies. I love the direction she’s going because it automatically keeps every novel fresh. This is a series, after all, and it’s really one very long story. Rowling certainly hasn’t lost her witty writer’s touch, and I look forward to the future novels. This one certainly isn’t bad by any means — it’s just an obvious stepping stone to the future instead of a complete story on it’s own. (It’s similar, in that respect, to
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