Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, Review

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is the sixth book in the seven book Harry Potter series by J K Rowling. But you know this. Everybody knows this. You also know that the book is the darkest of the series so far and that somebody dies. Everybody knows that.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Unfortunately this is not the strongest book in the series so far. I'd probably pick Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire for that award. That's not to say its a bad book, but more that you spend an awful lot of your reading time waiting for something to happen. There's a lot of talking, a lot of speculating, and a lot of things happen off stage. But it isn't until the last 100 pages or so that we get involved directly in the action.

One of the cleverer aspects of the Harry Potter series is that we really do watch Harry grow up. In many ways Half-Blood Prince is the book where that process reaches its conclusion. Rowling even hits at that at the beginning when she has Dumbledore mention that 17 is the age of maturity in wizarding circles. By the end of Half-Blood Prince, Harry Potter is no longer a child and for the first time he is ready not only to accept his destiny but to take steps to achieve it.

The problem is that to get there, Rowling spends a lot of time in the past, finally giving us Voldemort's history. And while she tries to cram in all the usual Hogwarts elements, they don't quite seem to fit this time round. Actually the more interesting plot elements are only touched upon briefly. I was far more interested in what was wrong with Tonks and her patronus than I was with the state of the Quidditch team this year.

But the end section of the book goes a long way to make up for the slowness of earlier chapters and if you've avoided spoilers it's bound to leave you in a state of shock. Harry Potter has grown up and his final book is going to have to reflect that.