BookOpinion

BookOpinion has compiled two of the early book reviews that have come out on J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” We won’t include spoilers on this page and just limited plot information. If you want further details, use the links to the full reviews.

The two early reviews that hit the media and irked Rowling and her publisher are from U.S. newspapers, one from the N.Y. Times and one from the Baltimore Sun. Neither gives key plot questions away, but they do touch on some details of the story. If you don’t want to know even the slightest details, we’ve tried to limit what we’ve quoted…but you should probably stop here.

The New York Times wrote and extensive review that outlined some plot details. Here’s an excerpt from their review:

…It is Ms. Rowling’s achievement in this series that she manages to make Harry both a familiar adolescent — coping with the banal frustrations of school and dating — and an epic hero, kin to everyone from the young King Arthur to Spider-Man and Luke Skywalker. This same magpie talent has enabled her to create a narrative that effortlessly mixes up allusions to Homer, Milton, Shakespeare and Kafka, with silly kid jokes about vomit-flavored candies, a narrative that fuses a plethora of genres (from the boarding-school novel to the detective story to the epic quest) into a story that could be Exhibit A in a Joseph Campbell survey of mythic archetypes.

In doing so, J. K. Rowling has created a world as fully detailed as L. Frank Baum’s Oz or J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, a world so minutely imagined in terms of its history and rituals and rules that it qualifies as an alternate universe, which may be one reason the “Potter” books have spawned such a passionate following and such fervent exegesis. With this volume, the reader realizes that small incidents and asides in earlier installments (hidden among a huge number of red herrings) create a breadcrumb trail of clues to the plot, that Ms. Rowling has fitted together the jigsaw-puzzle pieces of this long undertaking with Dickensian ingenuity and ardor. Objects and spells from earlier books — like the invisibility cloak, Polyjuice Potion, Dumbledore’s Pensieve and Sirius’s flying motorcycle — play important roles in this volume, and characters encountered before, like the house-elf Dobby and Mr. Ollivander the wandmaker, resurface, too…

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The Baltimore Sun also launched a review and liked how the series concluded. They write:

When you have read the last sentence on the last page of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” — no, we’re not going to reveal any plot twists — you will say, “Of course.”

That’s how inevitable the conclusion to the seven-book series seems. And it’s a tribute to author J.K. Rowling’s skill that, once you have finished “Hallows,” no other ending seems possible.

The ending incorporates so many of the speculations, many opposing, that have been rampant on the Web for years.

Taken as a whole, the Harry Potter series is a classic bildungsroman, a coming-of-age tale about the title character. In each of the six previous books, Harry has learned one important valuable life lesson — about the importance of choosing well, about the importance of learning to trust others, about the importance of recognizing the humanity in enemies.

Book 7, which goes on sale at 12:01 a.m. Saturday, is about coming to terms with death. (I read the book in advance.) As she attempts to grapple with the inevitable, Rowling evokes everything from learning to accept and even embrace that eventuality, to Christian notions of resurrection and redemption.

At the start of this final book, Harry and his two best friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, set out to…

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