J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Review

Overall Rating

Finally provides answers to questions raised in other books, including the result of the "final battle".
Tension and Suspense grip the reader throughout the story.
Characters are believable and have human traits.

The reader never finds out what happens to Florean Fortescue, the ice cream maker.
Very high death toll, higher than that of other books in the series.

This book takes up where Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince left off, a few days before Harry's seventeenth birthday. After Harry leaves the safety of aunt's house, the evil Lord Voldemort and his allies take over the Ministry of Magic, forcing Harry and his two best friends to go into hiding. The opening is tense due to the events at the end the last book, and there are deaths from the very beginning. The book details the events of ten months from July 1997 to May 1998 and provides answers to many questions raised in the first six books.
The story is told from the third person, but apart from the first chapter the events are seen from Harry's point of view. The setting changes frequently throughout the story, unlike the preceding books, which were all set at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizadry. Many characters' actions were not described in detail, as for much of the book Harry was in contact with only his two best friends. It was a good story because it finally tied up loose ends in the plots of the other Harry Potter books, and the reader finds out a lot of information about previously secretive characters, such as Albus Dumbledore and Severus Snape. I would like to have changed the death toll in this book as I feel that many deaths were unnecessary to the plot. This is well worth a read but only if you have read the first six books as many events lead on from the revelations of those books.