The Last-and Best—of Harry Potter

The sadness that many readers will experience—oh, all right, the tears they will shed—when they close the cover on this novel have nothing to do with the fate of the characters and everything to do with maturity. "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" is about, more than anything else, the end of childhood. The readers who have grown up with this series—who have read it, as it were, in real time as it unfolds—are themselves at that end. Saying goodbye to Harry is like saying goodbye to a piece of themselves. Rowling has honored their patience with a work as sincere and profound as anything they could reasonably ask for, with the added bonus that any time they want to relieve that childhood, they only have to pick up volume one and begin again. And if that's not magic, what is?

© 2007