I finished Harry Potter in something like ten hours. I will try not to give any spoilers. Not even reverse ones like, "I can't believe so-and-so DIDN'T kick the bucket."
Two of my predictions (one merely a flippant remark on my part) were absolutely correct. The rest of it, ummm, did she just flip from fan site to fan site and take the ideas that were merely plausible?
The first twenty chapters or so read like a Dan Brown novel. OK, we get it. Who was so stupid that they don't know this by now? Yeah, of course that's how that happened, why are you spending chapters and chapters explaining it, presumably your fans are a bit familiar with the territory.
Personally, I think it's a worse book than GoF in that it drags on and on with terribly unimportant things happening forever. It's like she forgot what she wanted to say and strays down a different path entirely. She introduces WAY too much new stuff and doesn't account for nearly enough of her previous assertions.
She does kill several people off, and I'll be damned but I missed two of them. Turns out they died in one sentence and I didn't notice it until Harry thought about it later and I went, "wait, what?" and had to go back and find the one sentence in which they're mentioned. She's become awfully callous with murdering people because it's convenient.
The first two deaths in the book are totally unrelated to anything else in the universe. Pointless, other than that they needed to be out of the way and she couldn't work out a better way to do it. (Though she leaves out a giant exception to this tiny circle o' people who need to die. Glares at you like a sore thumb all through the book- "But what about!? Why doesn't? Why can't!?")
The second half of the book is LOTR. It bothered me enough when she was only stealing names and character foibles from other places in literature, but stealing the plot lines is too much for me. HP didn't need a One Ring, and she gave it one, in a manner of speaking. (That's not a spoiler, that's a cryptic metaphor.)
She also relied on the same damn thing she's relied in on every single book: luck. Hell, even Voldemort gets pissed off about that. Every single other book has been Dumbledore, luck, friends and love that've saved him. While he had all that going for him, in the end, SHEER EFFING LUCK. (That's not a spoiler, that's a gross understatement of the situation.)
I think it's really disappointing that she broke form so completely in this book. If she was going to do so, she shouldn't have established it in the first place. She tried to get out of it a bit in the last book or so, but even still, Hogwarts and Quidditch have been central to the book. (That's not a spoiler, everyone knows there's no Quidditch in this book.) She established a pattern, and she didn't simply break with it, which would've been a nice contrast; she abandoned it entirely.
Really, I think the trouble is that after GoF, she stopped writing children's books. If you go back and look at Dumbledore in the first book, and compare him to the Dumbledore in the last book, or even the second to last book, they're two different people. I could understand if he were to change in Harry's eyes alone, but compare specifically the exchange at the beginning of Philosopher's Stone with McGonigall and the conversation he has with Harry in Half Blood Prince. Those are two totally different people.
It's as though, in the third book, he's suddenly being played by someone else. (Couldn't resist...)
It's not to say that books for children need to be frivolous and can't be serious (see Where The Red Fern Grows, and take Kleenex), but Rowling didn't stick with her style, because, I don't know why... I assume it's because she realised adults were reading, and so she decided she couldn't write the sort of things for adults she could for children. The earlier books have delightful details, foibles, and quirks. HBP isn't. This book isn't.
I've said from the beginning, the only way Harry was going to defeat Voldemort was if he didn't have his pocket deuses on stand-by. He had to lose the protection of Hogwarts, Dumbledore, his mother's protection, his godfather, his friends, etc, he would have to lose every single asset except for himself. And he does, but that isn't what makes him succeed. That's great, and a lot like real life and all, but, um, why do you need to take 700 pages with a LOAD of unnecessary stuff to tell us so?
I thought, if Rowling did an artful job of this, I could be an HP fan. She would've made an admirable job of the mess she started when she killed Sirius (that's not a spoiler, if you haven't read Phoenix by now, and you're reading this, I can't protect you any longer), and only complicated by what was truly a wonderful suspenseful thrilling concept in Snape's loyalties.
I have to say, THAT was the bit that disappointed me the most. Of all the moments that she threw away entirely, she threw Snape away the worst. Only her band-boxing up the Dursley's rivals it. (That's not a spoiler, I've said nothing about what she did with the Dursley's.) I suppose you might say her treatment of Neville was unfair as well, but I'd say she's been unfair to him throughout. (Though, really, I'd say as far as "coming of age" is concerned, Neville does a better show of it than Harry.)
Anyway, she did to Snape just exactly what everyone with half a brain had already predicted; most of my friends had even rejected it as the least compelling of the possibilities we put forth. I know I came up with half a dozen reasons I liked better. This was already so obvious, you felt there had to be more to it than that. Maybe she assumes the eleven year olds who are still with her for Harry will have to be hit on the head with the clues to recognise them.
Still, I didn't give a tinker's damn what happened to Harry, live, die, who cares? I wanted to know why Albus Dumbledore trusted Severus Snape completely. And my first thought was the correct answer. That's not what I wanted. I wanted to be spectacularly wrong just so I could be impressed with the wonderful work Rowling had done to prove me so utterly wrong, just as she did in Azkaban.
Oh, I love Azkaban. That's the only book I own, and the only one I'll ever pay money for. The funny thing about that book, other people know it's good too. It is the only only HP book to have won anything like a recognisable prestigious award. The Smarties awards just don't count. The first book got a commendation for a Carnegie Medal, but Azkaban won the Whitbread. That one was fun to read, said everything it needed to say, supplied red herrings in all the right places, didn't say things when it didn't need to, it was great. She has needed an editor with balls since then, but they were probably more desperate to get another book out than to worry about things like compelling writing.
I say, I've never been a real fan. As the Snape saga progressed, I'll admit to being a possible convert, but Rowling didn't manage the job. It was disappointing, on the whole.
Still, I'm glad it's over. If she knows what's good for her, she'll spend the rest of her life suing people for trying to publish their fanfic of how it really should've gone, and will never write another Harry or Harry related book again.
Nothing with a plot, anyway. I've no real problem with her writing the "textbooks" and publishing them for charity. Heck, I'd like to get my hands on a copy of Hogwarts A History. Hermione's so familiar with the pages, it was irritating she didn't talk more about it. Harry and Ron wouldn't have stood for it, of course, but I would've listened to her.
Also, were Harry Potter alive today (that's not a spoiler, because he's a fictional character and never been alive in the first place, so that means nothing), he would be the same age as The Boy. It's a bit peculiar thinking that, hey, he could've been Harry, well, you know, if the universe were vastly different. I suppose it's because the books don't feel vastly different from now, but my memories of the 90's put the events of the book in a completely different light. I mean, I was at summer camp while the Weasley's were on holiday in Egypt. Luna and Ginny are a year older than me.
Funny sort of perspective.
Anyway, this has taken me several hours to write (I keep looking things up to confirm, and get distracted by information). I'm glad I've read it, but I can't say it was worth it. I think she may have doomed herself and ended up with a Wizard of Oz series, a book with a movie that's watched far more often than the book is ever read. I'm one of the few people I've known who has read one Oz book, never mind more than one. And Oz was huge when it was written.
Time shall tell.