Rowling suffers from penultimate book in long series disease 



Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is a worthy addition to the J.K. Rowling oeuvre but only just. In hindsight, how could the sixth book in a planned seven-book series that must culminate with a deciding battle between good and evil be anything else? As many reviewers have noted, the writing and dialogue are as witty and bright as ever but the story is bogged down with loads of explanations addressing the many prior unanswered questions raised in the first five books. So now we know.

But there is also a dearth of great inventive stuff that is, I think, what made these books so compelling for adults and children in the first place. Sadly, there's nothing here on par with Platform 9-3/4, the Dementors and the patronis spell that wards them off, Dobby the house elf or a world cup of quidditch, to name just of a few of my favorite Rowling-isms from prior novels. Instead we have the grand set-up for the glorious battle to come in two years or so when we can finally read the concluding piece. I envy those who will pick up the first Harry Potter novel after that seventh tome is already on the shelves, just as early readers of Frank Herbert's Dune series, Roger Zelazny's Amber series or Philip Jose Farmer's River World books probably envied me.

A selection of other reviewer's thoughts:
Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times -
"It is a novel that pulls together dozens of plot strands from previous volumes, underscoring how cleverly and carefully J. K. Rowling has assembled this giant jigsaw puzzle of an epic."

"...Indeed, the achievement of the Potter books is the same as that of the great classics of children's literature, from the Oz novels to "The Lord of the Rings": the creation of a richly imagined and utterly singular world, as detailed, as improbable and as mortal as our own."

Laura Miller in Salon -
This book "has the unenviable job of preparing the field for the final showdown, and for the first time, Rowling wobbles just a bit in pulling off the task she's set for herself. In the end, though, she regains her footing and "Half-Blood Prince" comes together, making it not quite the most graceful novel in the series, but perhaps the most impressive."

Emily Green, new to the series, in the L.A. Times -
"The rest of the world may have been following his progress since owls began flying by day in the first Harry Potter novel in 1997, but at least one person in the book-buying world resisted the bespectacled little wizard. Me."

Christopher Paolini, who grades the book A-, in Entertainment Weekly -
"It's heartening, both as an author and a reader, to see that J.K. Rowling is brave enough to experiment with her beloved series, and that she has remained true to the emotional and physical development of her characters."

David Kipen for the San Francisco Chronicle -
"No, the main problem is that J.K. Rowling has now written six of these bricks. Even if they were getting better, they're certainly not getting any fresher."

And Liz Rosenberg for the Boston Globe -
"All the same, there has been a sea-change over the past few Potter books, beginning with the opening scene of the fourth, ''Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire." It is the difference between fantasy, which was the territory of the first, second, and most of the third books, and horror, the new territory now entered in earnest."


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Posted: Thu - July 21, 2005 at 10:12 PM          

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