Harry Potter, Hype, & The Half Blood Prince

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Hello, and greetings, Everyone!

Well, the Half Blood Prince has been out for about 3 weeks now, so I don't feel bad about writing a S-P-O-I-L-E-R. Scraped up my pennies and finally managed a copy. Lost a couple of nights sleep reading, and voila! I'm a bit disappointed. There's no other way to put it. The best of everything, literature, popular fiction, movies, art, you name it, seem to all fall pray to hype in the end. As an artist and web merchant, I can't criticize. If you don't stick some hype in there, nobody's going to notice, no matter how great the work. And, let's face it, nobody wants his/her hard work and sacrifice to produce a work of art that will be totally unrecognized.

But with all that said, I'd really hoped for a little more plot development in the series--at least a few explanations of some of the things that have been hanging us up all this time--like how do house elves apparate within Hogwarts? And, what the heck was some of that stuff in the Minestry of Magic. I was especially disappointed that Neville was hardly mentioned, not to speak of his parents, in HBP. Really expected some kind of revelation here.

From my astrological reading for Harry, I expected a significant influence from a woman, but who would have guessed that the spacey, Trelawney would be the one to reveal to Harry Snape's involvement in the death of his parents? Frankly I've never liked or trusted Snape; always felt that Dumbledore was really hoping against hope. But to have Snape turn into the cold blooded murder of the most "divine" character of the series...Wow! The only thing that I can figure is that JKR had to kill Dumbledore off to force Harry to become a real adult. But where does that leave our hero's blood protection spell, worked by DD? Now that DD is gone, is the spell still in force? Or, since Harry will turn 17 in just a few months at book's end, maybe this is a moot point.

It's clear enough HBP's end that Harry is no longer the poor, undernourished, bespecaled, victimized kid. He's on his way to manhood, understanding more fully the real nature of evil and the falacy of so-called prophesies. Ok, that's no small feat, but for goodness sake, we've read five substantial books with lots of information (leaving room for lots of speculation) that seems to have fallen by the wayside. Was most of it simply hype? How's JKR going to tie it all together? What's going to become of the Order of the Phoenix now that Snape's on the loose with so much info?

Well, like everybody else, I have no choice but to wait. But am certainly hoping for some real earth shattering developments in Book 7. And really hoping that our hero doesn't meet the same fate as Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot!

That's it for now,

Have a great week!

~Paula Gaon