In an earlier Harry Potter novel, Sibyll Trelawney, divination teacher,
looks at Harry and declares that her inner
eye sees past his "brave
face to the troubled soul within." "I regret to say that your worries are not baseless," she adds. "I
see difficult times ahead for you, alas ... most difficult ... I fear
the thing you dread will indeed come to pass ... and perhaps sooner
than you think." In "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,"
that frightening prophecy does in fact come true - in a thoroughly
harrowing denouement that sees the death of yet another important
person in Harry's life, and that renders this, the sixth volume of the
series, the darkest and most unsettling installment yet. It is
a novel that pulls together dozens of plot strands from previous
volumes, underscoring how cleverly and carefully J. K. Rowling has
assembled this giant jigsaw puzzle of an epic. It is also a novel that
depicts Harry Potter, now 16, as more alone than ever - all too well
aware of loss and death, and increasingly isolated by his growing
reputation as "the Chosen One," picked from among all others to do
battle with the Dark Lord, Voldemort. As the novel opens, the
wizarding world is at war: Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters have
grown so powerful that their evil deeds have spilled over into the
Muggle world of nonmagic folks. The Muggles' prime minister has been
alerted by the Ministry of Magic about the rise of Voldemort. And the
terrible things that Ms. Rowling describes as being abroad in the green
and pleasant land of England read like a grim echo of events in our own
post-9/11, post-7/7 world and an uncanny reminder that the Hogwarts
Express, which Harry and his friends all take to school, leaves from
King's Cross station - the very station where the suspected London
bombers gathered minutes before the explosions that rocked the city
nine days ago. Harry, who as an infant miraculously survived a
Voldemort attack that killed his mother and father, is regarded as "a
symbol of hope" by many in the wizarding world, and as he learns more
about the Dark Lord's obsession with his family, he realizes that he
has a destiny he cannot escape. Like Luke Skywalker, he is eager to
play the role of hero. But like Spider-Man, he is also aware of the
burden that that role imposes: although he has developed romantic
yearnings for a certain girl, he is wary of involvement, given his
recognition of the dangers he will have to face. "It's been like
... like something out of someone else's life, these last few weeks
with you," he tells her. "But I can't ... we can't ... I've got things
to do alone now." Indeed, the perilous task Professor
Dumbledore sets Harry in this volume will leave him with less and less
time for Quidditch and hanging out with his pals Ron and Hermione: he
is to help his beloved teacher find four missing Horcruxes -
super-secret, magical objects in which Voldemort has secreted parts of
his soul as a means of ensuring his immortality. Only when all of these
items have been found and destroyed, Harry is told, can the Dark Lord
finally be vanquished. There are a host of other unsettling
developments in this novel, too: the Dementors, those fearsome
creatures in charge of guarding Azkaban Prison, have joined forces with
Voldemort; Draco Malfoy, Harry's sneering classmate who boasts of
moving on to "bigger and better things," appears to vanish regularly
from the school grounds; the sinister Severus Snape has been named the
new teacher of defense against the dark arts; two Hogwarts students are
nearly killed in mysterious attacks; and Dumbledore suddenly turns up
with a badly injured hand, which he declines to explain. One of the few
bright spots in Harry's school life appears to be an old textbook
annotated by its enigmatic former owner, who goes by the name the
Half-Blood Prince - a book that initially supplies Harry with some
helpful tips for making potions.The early and middle sections of
this novel meld the ordinary and the fantastic in the playful fashion
Ms. Rowling has patented in her previous books, capturing adolescent
angst about boy-girl and student-teacher relations with perfect pitch.
Ron and Hermione, as well as Harry, all become involved in romantic
flirtations with other students, even as they begin to realize that
their O.W.L. (Ordinary Wizarding Level) grades may well determine the
course of their post-Hogwarts future. As the story proceeds, however,
it grows progressively more somber, eventually becoming positively
Miltonian in its darkness. In fact, two of the novel's final scenes -
like the violent showdown between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker
in the last "Star Wars" movie, "Revenge of the Sith" - may well be too
alarming for the youngest readers.We want to know more about Harry's parents - how they met and
married and died - because that may tell us more about Harry's own
yearnings and decisions. We want to know more about Dumbledore's desire
to believe the best of everyone because that may shed light on whom he
chooses to trust. We want to know more about the circumstances of Tom
Riddle's birth because that may shed light on his decision to reinvent
himself as Lord Voldemort.Indeed, the achievement of the Potter
books is the same as that of the great classics of children's
literature, from the Oz novels to "The Lord of the Rings": the creation
of a richly imagined and utterly singular world, as detailed, as
improbable and as mortal as our own.GET THIS BOOK FREE.BUY SELL RENT BOOKS ONLINE - ON MY BLOG.http://workfromhomedepot.blogspot.com/2008/01/review-books-summary-abstracts.html