It was pretty good up until pg 704 and then J.K. tacked on three needless chapters. Since I was a good girl and didn’t look at spoilers, I was crying when Harry walked to his death. But then J.K. Rowlings went soft on me and didn’t do what she was foreshadowing throughout the book. IMO, it would have been much more interesting and had greater emotional impact if she had kept Harry dead. The Epilogue was a pure cop-out.Reading the thread before your post, I was beginning to think I was the only one that felt this way. It was so sad, but I thought she was working on the perfect ending and that the rest of the book would be Ron, Hermoine and Neville working together to finish off Valdemort. But instead it was, oh nevermind, let me give you a sappy ending. It really disappointed me.
I completely agree. I thought that the whole idea of the Story of the Three Brothers was that the Third Brother because of his gift was able to accept and embrace Death when it finally came to him. When I heard that, I thought that J.K. was foreshadowing Harry going willingly to his own death and thereby winning the final victory over Voldemort. I think that this is what J.K. was planning to write, but Scholastic got nervous about killing off the main character and forced her to rewrite the ending to be more Disney.
This is a pity, because like you suggest, the book would have flowed better if Harry had died in The Forest Again and then the rest had finished off Voldemort. There could have then been a short epilogue bringing the book up to present day (from 1998), showing all the survivors going on with their lives while Harry, Dumbledore, etc. watched from above.