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“**WARNING - This review is very descriptive, and...”

Written on: 19/07/2005 by James Stag

Good Points
Strong ending. Unexpected deaths, and unexpected character changes.

Bad Points
Everything not mentioned above!

General Comments
**WARNING - This review is very descriptive, and reveals a lot of the plot - Do not read on, if you want to read the book first**










Before I begin this review I must say one thing. I look up to J.K. Rowling, and I loved all the first five books in the series. The review preceding therefore is nothing personal, and I am not predjudiced against the series. If I were to write a review about the other books, they would have gotten 15 stars out of 10! Now though, I give you my review...


The new Harry Potter book "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince" was to me, extremely dissapointing! The first few chapters had a great sense of writing and were wonderful, but when Harry left the burrow I knew something was wrong. The plot was, I found weak and unexplained compared to the other books. There were large gaps and little explanation of them. Besides Harry's conversations with Dumbeldore, there was very little detailed dialouge. One thing I found extremely surprising, was the lack of grief. Harry had lost his godfather. The only father figure he had, at the hands of Lord Voldermort! He proved at the end of book 5 that he was very unstable to the loss of his godfather (unless ripping apart the Headmasters office is normal behavior for Hogwarts students!). These feelings seemed unresolved by the end of book five. Yet there was in the book, only 4 brief touches on his grief for Sirius. Harry seemed to forget all about his Godfathers death in two weeks. I found characters acting completely out of the ordinary. Their personalities changing drastically! This leads to my next issue. ... sigh... This was the part where the book lost me. I, having read the rest of the Harry Potter series as everyone else had, expected Harry's Quidditch games, trips to Hogsmeade, talks of studying numerous essays, classes, and the odd hints at a relationship betwen members of the trio. Boy was I wrong! The middle portion of this book was (and I am extremely sorry to say this), like something out of Day's of our lives. This leads back to my previous statment. Hermione was totally out of character! If it were not for her nagging at Harry about the potions book. I would have thought that Padma patil had taken a polyjuice potion and was pretending to be Hermione. First of all hermione has looked at Ron throughout the series with looks ranging from "despising to Disgusted", She fought with him constantly and now all of a sudden she is so madly in love with him, that when he dates someone else, she dates her 4th least favorite person just to "get back" at him - are you serious! This is full of kissing and getbacks, and relationships out of thin air! I mean Harry has known Ginny for five years and shown no interest while he gets closer and closer to hermione. And then all of a sudden he feels like tearing someone up for kissing her, and longing to be with her. This for me was so horrible, that had it not been 3:00A.M. in the morning I would have totally screamed bloody murder! These relationships to me made no sense! Through the last books, it was tantalizing relationship hints that kept people reeling, yet they were more worried about who was going to die next. But this was straight out of a soap opera. I end this review by saying sadly, that the whole time I was reading this story I felt like it had been written by someone else. Like it was a bad fan of fiction or something. But sadly this was not true and this book has left me with a feeling of huge disappointment. Well maybe better luck next time!