Now here’s a weird one: Page 328. Anoreth (my oldest) has James Potter’s birthday. Vlad the Usurper (my youngest) has Lily Potter’s birthday. And both Potter’s died on the birthday of Tom (my weirdest).
Woodle - WOODLE - woodle - WOODLE ...
Hedwig. Does that make me weird?
Just finished listening to it.
I have tears running down my face. I’m such a wimp...
Bookmark bump for when I finish the book (there is some competition in my house)
Not one mention of the Dursleys’ survival.
So 19 years later Harry ended up eating onion rings with his family at a diner in Jersey?
(Cut to black.)
I for one will be glad when all the excitement over such drivel is finished. With all the good reading available to kids they get potter, porn, and at the college level, queer studies, gender studies, and various ethnic studies. What a waste of time, IMHO.
It took me about 12 hours to read the book, (not counting the 4 hour nap from 3 am to 7 am) and I was ticked JK killed Hedwig and Mad-Eye right off the bat!
Then, I was ticked that she had Harry, Ron and Hermoine stumbling around for the middle half of the book. Don’t get me wrong, the chapter with Harry and Hermoine visiting Godrick’s Hollow was pretty good, but did she really need them to go stumbling around the woods all the rest of the time?
Then, she had the nerve to go and kill off Dobby! And then when the action finally started to pick up with the battle at Hogwarts, she was offing so many characters I thought the title of the book should have been Harry Potter and the Final Bloodbath!
Anyway, I do have one question. In the final showdown between Harry and Voldy, there in the Great Hall, Harry just gets through telling Voldy that the reason he couldn’t get the wand he got from DD’s hand to work correctly was because he (Voldy) didn’t have the Elder wand. Draco took it from DD during the battle at the top of the Astronomy Tower and that since Harry took the very same wand from Draco he now possessed the Elder Wand. Then they both square off and the book says that “Avada Kedrava” and “Expelleramus” (SP???) were both uttered at the same time, but she didn’t indicate which one uttered which. So my question is,
Am I the only one who thinks that Harry threw the AK curse while Voldy was snookered by Harry into casting the Expelleramus charm thinking he could get the wand away from Harry?
Anybody?
To answer one of your original questions, the death that keeps hurting the most is Snape’s. I would have hoped for them to come to some understanding while Snape still lived, for Harry to say how sorry he was for his dad’s behavior.
But this way makes it more tragic, and sadder. Harry barely gets there in time to see him die so ignominiously, having no idea what it means. But Snape does, and with his last breath, he tells Harry to look at him — so that (we surmise) he can see those eyes, so like Lilly’s eyes, that he’s dying for.
So bitterly sad.
Join y'all soon at the end.
Ok, I have a question. Bathilda Bagsly(?) was able to “see” Herry and Hermione even though they were under the invisibilty cloak. Now I think this was because it was not in fact Bathilda, but was instead, Nagini the snake. The snake was able to sense their body heat and thus “see” them.
Now, when Harry met Voldemort in the forest the snake was still inside his protective bubble. But after Narcissa proclaimed Harry dead the protection was lifted from Nagini.I wonder why the snake was not able to detect that harry was actually alive?
First thing that got me was that everyone's theories were so totally wrong outside of possible deaths and the final horcrux (although it wasn't necessarily his scar, so much as it was Harry himself).
I'm going to have fun reading the mugglenet.com book with predictions on Book 7. (I got it from the library. It's on my shelf right now!)
I was afraid that he'd get a 1-on-1 showdown like GoF instead of big battle like OotP, and the plotting (or was it "plodding"??) through the woods gave me a bad feeling. I wanted to know where everyone else was and I didn't care about these new (or at least unimportant) people that kept showing up in the middle of the book.
Anyway, we got an ending that not only made OotP look like a playground scuffle at recess, but it was reminiscent (I tired, I know I spelled it wrong) of The Battle of Five Armies in the Hobbit (or were there Six? Oh, who could keep track -- there were so many!)
On the deaths, I predicted Snape, but for the wrong reason, and either Fred or George, but not both. I figured that a Weasley would die and it wouldn't be one that Harry had already saved. That left Fred, George, Percy, Bill and Charlie and the mother. Bill's already been damaged, so scratch him. The readers really only had a vested interest in Fred or George, so it had to be one of those two. Percy's death wouldn't have meant as much.
I would have liked to have seen an epilogue that let us know what happened to more of the characters, particularly some of the minor ones, in the aftermath of the big battle, but I guess we should be happy with what we got. Maybe Jo could be convinced to write a novella for some charity.
I knew that Dumbledore wasn't a dupe and we finally found out why he trusted Snape so much. Lots of other cool stuff that I'm sure has already been mentioned.
But in the end, at its core, it remained a children's fantasy story, when love conquers all. Not only that, but a Mother's love: Lily, Mrs. Weasley, and even Narcissa.
And here's one other tidbit that I looked up because I was curious:
Weasels are mammals in the genus Mustela of the Mustelidae family.
The otter (lutrinae) is a carnivorous aquatic or marine mammal part of the family Mustelidae, which also includes weasels...
Should've been obvious.