Now What Am I Going to Do?

As planned, The Child and I set off first thing yesterday morning to get our copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Her plans for the day had changed as The Boyfriend had invited her to the Bite of Seattle (like the Taste of Chicago, only with rain). And real boyfriends apparently trump literary heroes when you are 13. But we had time between getting the books and when she was supposed to meet him so she suggested that we get coffee somewhere and start reading. Which we did.

Only as soon as we sat down she was all "What time is it?" and "Shouldn't we go soon? and generally interrupting my reading so I deposited her with Boyfriend, came home, settled myself in and started to read.

I read and read. I ate some grapes. I read and read and read. I took a 2 hour nap. I read and read and read and read and had hamburgers with The Spouse. And then I read and read and kept reading until I thought, "Golly, it's midnight. I can finish this tomorrow" and just then I read something that made me say, "Golly, I've got to finish this now". So I did.

"And now you have nothing to look forward to ever again," smiled The Spouse this morning.

Of course, he's kinda right. I remember, for example, when I discovered the Lord Peter mysteries by Dorothy L. Sayers. I'm not even that much a fan of murder mysteries. But I liked the character of Lord Peter, a lot, and especially his odd romance with Harriet Vane, so I read them, more for the wit and the intrigue and the descriptions of food than for the mystery stuff. And then, one day I read the last book. And there weren't ever going to be anymore. (Actually, there was. A few years ago someone took the manuscript Sayers was working on when she died and fashioned it into one last Lord Peter story. It was OK).

And sure, you can re-read the books (and I do) and mine new things out of them and revisit the bits you really love and that's all good. But still, that first realization that there's no more to come is a little sad.

So I felt a little sad early this morning, when I closed the cover on HPVII. JK Rowling took us on a wicked good ride. It's been known that she's known all along how the saga would end and the best way to describe the ending of the final book is "fitting". It's not so much that she tidies everything up, although I suppose she does. Blanks are filled in. Questions are answered. And it is, in the style of all good epics, a matter of character determining destiny. But it is not pulled together in a way that is pat or dismissive. And I'm obviously just dying here because I'm desperate to talk to someone about it and no one I know has finished the book yet! So if one of you could get on that, please, I'd really appreciate it.

I was right about some stuff and partially right about some stuff and wrong about a few things. All of which I can live with. And what you've heard is true. Quite a lot of dying in this one. Tons of action, some snogging (not as much as in 5 and 6 but apparently adolescents don't think so much about snogging when their lives are in mortal danger).

And once again, I must give Ms. Rowling her props. This mega-franchise which has spawned from her work could have been the death of that work. But despite the astonishing success, the millions and millions of dollars, the movies, the products that could fill a thousand Hogwarts Castles, somehow she has managed to always keep it about the books. And each story has been better than the last, her style more confident, the characters more complex. She could have been phoning in these last few books and they would no doubt still have been best-sellers. But she didn't then and she hasn't now.

I haven't decided yet if the 7th will stand as my favorite of the series. But it's a bloody good book. I'm just sorry it's done.