No spoilers here, so don’t worry. All in all, a decent book and a fitting end. I was satisfied, and as long as Mrs. Rowling doesn’t write any more books in this world she has crafted, it is a very nice collection that feels complete.
However…
Since the Order of the Phoenix, I’ve seriously felt like she should just have been honest and titled one of her books Harry Potter and the Boring Chunks of Exposition. Up through Goblet of Fire, J.K. was pretty good about keeping the action, the story, moving, only stopping once in a while to fill in a gap here and there. It is something that tends to happen in any book that tries to keep secrets from the audience, since you have to omit certain things to retain the mystery, there will come a point where you have to show that it has been figured out. How uncomfortable or odd that telling is usually depends on the type of information hidden and how much. In the Potter books, entire characters are essentially hidden from the reader, and trying to get that much information back to the reader is hard. J.K. Rowling, by Order of the Phoenix, just started resorting to “the lecture”, which is to say you suddenly (or not so suddenly) get an entire chapter of one character explaining things to another character. In many other books this is usually avoided by having the unknown information spread out among a handful of characters who meet up and share, the back and forth of it and the fact that many characters are also finding out stuff too involves the reader much more deeply than when one character just dumps fifteen pages of backstory on another.
In that respect, Deathly Hallows was the worst book of the series. There probably nearly a dozen chapters of someone dumping information on Harry, only some of which he has figured out on his own and where he hardly participates in the conversation except to repeat back some of the information in the form of questions to prod the other person onward.
I also can honestly say that I wasn’t very surprised. The book consisted almost entirely of telegraphed punches, you can see every twist coming if you are paying attention. Of course, this is, after all, a children’s book, so don’t bring your CSI trained analytical mind with you and you’ll enjoy the book much more.
And just to make sure people don’t think I’m hating on the book, I really did enjoy it, and I gladly recommend this series to anyone. It is worth the read.
It would be better if film makers had done one part movie not in two.