Dumbledore dies, Snape killed him. If you’ve not read the book yet, you should probably not read that last sentence because it’s what’s known as a spoiler; however if you just want to forgo the book and wait for the seventh one, you can read that sentence and have the entire plot.
I read this book in two days, depriving myself of sleep. I obviously enjoyed this book. It was a very good book, even if was a Harry Potter book. Yet, no matter how much I liked it, I find I cannot deny the simple fact that the only thing resembling a climax was killing Dumbledore. The book had no other end goal it seems, making us feel cheated when we finish and find that Harry had accomplished absolutely nothing.
It set us up a bit for finishing off the last book, but almost all of that setting up could have been contained in a prologue to the actual seventh book.
Allow me to rewrite the entire book in a form that doesn’t require us to lose sleep or kill an entire tree in making it:
Harry once again doesn’t enjoy staying at the Dursley’s, and then spends the rest of the summer at the Weasley’s. They then go to school, where Harry continues to believe everyone is staring at him, displaying the classic signs of paranoid schizophrenia. Hermione and Ron play a game where continuously pretend that they don’t have crushes on each other, and then get together for a small emotional payoff that makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside.
Harry has to have a crush too, so he feels like part of the ‘in’ crowd. He decides to have one on his best friend’s little sister, who’s like 6, making him a pedophile. Harry’s crush actually turns into an rare form of Wizarding heartburn that is described by the author to act like an animal in his chest or something stupid like that. In the original book, it bursts out and starts killing everything, like in the movie “Alien”, but JK Rowling decided at the last minute to cut this part out because it was so cool it made the rest of the book seem dull.
They find out that Voldemort has seven part-souls and they have to kill them all. They don’t find any of them, because that would accomplish something. They do, however, all decide to agree that Voldemort is not a very nice guy and will have to start allowing the other wizards to inspect his country for weapons of mass destruction.
Dumbledore then dies a pointless death at the hand of the obviously evil Severus Snape (after Draco Malfoy shows himself to be a nancy who’d much rather fiddle around with his wand then use magic for its real purpose of killing). Dumbledore’s dying thought is recorded as “Damn, with a head as big as I constantly claim mine to be, I should have realized that the evil-acting guy is, for all intents and purposes, actually evil, though I continuously refused to deny it.”
This is then the point where we realize that the book is over and we want to know what happened to the real ending. Harry waves his wand and then drinks his lucky potion to try to find it. He then trips over a drunken Dumbledore sitting in the grass, and they find that it was just a bum off the streets they had buried. Everyone’s happy and then Harry wakes up sad to find he was dreaming again. A horrible ending to resort to the “wake up” cliché, of course, but no worse than the one we were handed in the real book.
In the end, I rate it 4.5π. It was a good book, just one I had to rant about because I liked it so much. The ending wasn’t so horrible. Go read it, even if you’ve never read a Harry Potter book before. It’s good.
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