And I did it very quickly so that nobody would spoil it for me so I will have to read it again :D

I did enjoy it and I think JK Rowling ended it very well. I certainly love the world she created and well done for her!

I started reading the HP books when Lionchaser read to me whilst I chopped vegetables at her house for dinner - having badgered me to read them for ages. I went on to read the four that were published at that time in a week….

I finished the last book as Lionchaser read to me whilst I chopped vegetables at New Wine the other week…. Have only realised in the last couple of days how circular and apt that was.

I mourned the dead…especially Dobby…..see I said there would be spoilers…you only have yourself to blame if you are reading this and you didn’t want to know!

And I cried at the end at the ‘Albus Severus’ bit - so amazing.

I also felt very smug as I have been firmly planted in the Snape can’t be evil camp since the end of the last one! In fact Lionchaser and I even have tshirts to prove it

As for God stuff I loved it when Harry tells Voldemort that his curses are no longer binding on anyone as Harry willingly went to his death for them and they were now protected by that love. Great stuff!!

She wasn’t setting out to write ‘Christian books’, certainly; but she is a Reader in the Church of Scotland, and any decent writer’s core beliefs will find their way into what they write somehow.

No - I don’t think JK Rowling purposefully put any Christian stuff in there….but I think the great truths of the universe stir the hearts of many even if they don’t acknowledge where those stirrings and longings come from.

Good v evil, the way we desperately want to be involved in a battle of epic proportions in which light triumphs over dark, sacrificing yourself for others are timeless human mythic archetypes….makes you wonder where those ideas come from?!

I love the way that God speaks to me through stuff that the original authors never intended….

Great points Gill….

Have to agree with all the above. Of the all the deaths in the book Dobby was the saddest for me. The twist and turns worked well.

On another site I post on someone called it ‘Hermione Granger and the unfeasably long Camping holiday’ I get what they mean but I thought it worked well.

Snape’s partronous was a surprise. We thought it was going to be Ginniy’s, you know Harry’s being a stag. I think it shows that Snape was good at heart.

I think it is the best of the books, but you need to read the others to understand it.

Great to see you back on the forum, Jax!

Sorry to come to this so late…

I started book 7 when it came out but found that I just could not remember anything from the previous books at all (eg all the stuff about horcruxes), so I ended up going back and re-reading the second half of book 5 and the whole of book 6 again. I really enjoyed rereading those other books - especially The Half Blood Prince with all the fascinating delving into people’s old memories esp all that stuff about Voldemort’s parents and grandparents. It certainly paints a pitiful picture - the demented old man and his son and daughter, living in their hovel and clinging to their only possession - their pride in their ancestry.

The Deathly Hallows, was a brilliant read. However looking back on it now, I think it was one of the less good of the series (my favourites are 1-3 and 6). As Flagman has noted the “camping trip” really was interminable - the only time in all 7 books that I started bored. Paradoxically, once the action started I felt it was all a bit rushed and there are still some gaps in my understanding of what happened. Eg I thought the goblin ran off with Gryffindor’s sword during the raid on Gringotts, yet later on it turns up in the sorting hat. I thought that Hermione & Ron found it remarkably easy to open the chamber of secrets again - that surely deserved a couple of chapters. There are also numerous cases of magical devices conveniently helping the plot along (a frequent criticism of this genre) eg the way that Ron’s lighter just happened to bring him to the right place to save harry from drowning, the way that the baddies constantly forget to create protective spells that include the house elves. I thought the whole idea of the horcruxes was very clever, especially one being inside Harry himself, and the whole scene where Snape dies and then Harry finds out the truth was very moving. I must admit that I didn’t have Rufus and Lionchaser’s faith in Snape, after book 6 I had accepted that he was a baddy but deep down I was hoping that somehow he would still turn out to be good. It is interesting reading the ending of The Half Blood Prince knowing what we know now i.e. when Dumbledore says to Snape, “Please, Severus”, he is actually begging Snape to go ahead and do the deed. [I have to say that I’m not that convinced by the plotting here. I suppose Snape killing Dumbledore helped Snape’s cover as a Death Eater but on the other hand surely it would have been more useful for the cause for Dumbledore to have been around for a bit longer. Dumbledore’s reasons for wanting to be killed by Snape don’t seem that convincing really]. Snape is of course the star character in the whole book - not wholly good or wholly bad, overall on the right side but maybe not for the correct motives, heavily affected by his past but still able to overcome his personal demons to be used for good.

I don’t fully understand the whole Kings Cross scene. What was the baby-like creature? Why did Harry not die properly? It seems to me that too much gets explained away with “it’s because your mother sacrificed her life for you”. At the time with V’s people on the rampage, there must have been other cases of people giving their lives for their children, yet the series seems to imply that this was a unique event.

Having said all that, the whole series has been amazing - I am sure we will not see the like of it again. Just the fact that whole websites can spend hours debating the finer points of what was supposed to be a series of books for children , just shows what JK has achieved. Also, the Christian symbolism of the ending is amazing. I am sure that JK knew what she was doing here. She knows that people will inevitably draw parallels between Harry humbly and submissively going to his death to save the world and Christ meekly going to the cross - and the resurrection is definitely the icing on the cake! And Kings Cross as GillH has said, the name is surely significant.

Thanks for that woofwoof - I’d wondered what she imagined happening to everyone!
Interesting thoughts as well - yes the camping trip was indeed pretty dull! But I loved most of the book especially the last few chapters which to me were just the prefect ending - I really thought I’d posted on this thread already to say that but I don’t seem to have done!

Re the sword I think the idea is that wherever it happens to be a true Griffindor can pull it from the hat in time of need - presumably it just disappears from wherever it set off from…that was my interpretation anyway from what is said in Chamber of Secrets. I LOVED the fact that Neville finally had his moment to be a hero - I had been hoping for that for about three books! And I liked that Harry and co saved Malfoy and his cronies too - it finally made them rise above the petty-ness of those relationships during the series (where they often treated Malfoy ALMOST as badly as he treated them - or certainly wanted to anyway!) and show themselves the better people. And my faith in Snape never wavered - definitely the most interesting character in the series and in many ways one of the true heroes, despite as you pointed out being so flawed - again this is pretty biblical it occurs to me.