Stand-alone books often suffer from a phenomenon whereby you get chapter after chapter of action, and then in one chapter you'll get the entire plot at once. Series of games suffer from it too; The Legacy Of Kain series had some fantastic action sequences, but Soul Reaver 2 was like playing a film, it was so full of plot.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is that book.
This book is the set-up for Harry Potter 7. The stage is set for the final confrontation and, without revealing too much, things don't look amazing for the Good side. Harry has grown into an angry, hormonal teenager, at odds with a lot of the world and under siege on all sides because of who he is. Nonetheless he has also become confident and is entirely able to comport himself in a world of adults. Nearing his seventeenth birthday by the end of the book, he is, of course, younger than both Hermione and Ron, who spend most of the book arguing and not talking to each other, just like - unfortunately – the previous two books.
I'm not going to reveal who dies at the end of the book; to do so would be called ‘being an asshole' but suffice to say she keeps us guessing. I have to admit that however blazé I was about her killing a ‘major character' (Rowling said that about HP4, and it was only Cedric Diggory) even I let out a couple of gasps when I thought she'd killed someone. Rowling is really good at juggling with her characters' lives… and her readers' sensibilities.
So, what else can I reveal about HP6 without totally ruining the story? Well, not a lot, to be blunt. As I said, it's the ‘Plot' book in the series, the book where everything unites for the final confrontation, and the deck is cleared for combat. However, there's a lot of romantic action, including one character commenting on a tattoo that is rumoured to be on Harry's chest… which suggests she's seen his chest. Rowling is, to my mind, slightly clumsy when talking about the romance side of things, although that could be because I'm slightly older than her target audience. To a child or a love-struck teen, the idea of Harry's feelings being a beast that roars in his chest, writhes around his heart and causes him to feel good when he gets what he wants, is an apt description.
Size-wise HP6 is shorter than the mammoth HP5 (Order of the Phoenix) by about a hundred pages, which makes a change; the usual increase in size in HP1 through to HP5 left some wondering if HP7 would be a book of Biblical proportions.
Rowling uses Dumbledore a lot more in this book, as is evident from his appearance on the front cover. This is a pleasant change from HP5, where Dumbledore stayed out of Harry's way for almost the entire book. Having said that, Harry retorted by rampaging round the headmaster's office, destroying trinkets and generally being hormonally teenaged. And who can blame him? If you were told that it was your destiny to kill a man or die trying, however evil that man was, you'd be a bit pissed off that you didn't know up to know.
The remaining questions are: Will Harry survive the showdown with Voldemort, will any more characters be killed off, who will the seventh Defence Against the Dark Arts tutor be… I'm not spoiling anything by asking that. In five years, Harry has had five different tutors, you don't expect the sixth to last the year, do you?
In summary, a thinking-mans Harry Potter book, with more addition to the plot than any previous book in the series. Roll on HP7, due in about two years, no doubt.
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