The final confrontation between Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, the Chosen One, the "symbol of hope" for both the Wizard and Muggle worlds, and Lord Voldemort, He Who Must Not Be Named, the nefarious leader of the Death Eaters and would-be ruler of all. Good versus Evil. Love versus Hate. The Seeker versus the Dark Lord. 10 years in the making, from the Greek myths to Dickens and Tolkien to "Star Wars." And true to its roots, it ends with good old-fashioned closure: heart-racing, bone-chilling confrontation and an epilogue that clearly lays out people's fates. Getting to the finish line is not seamless -- the last part of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," the seventh and final book in the series, has some lumpy passages of exposition and a couple of clunky detours -- but the overall conclusion and its determination of the main characters' story lines possess a convincing. With each installment, the "Potter" series has grown increasingly dark, and this volume is no exception. While Ms. Rowling's astonishingly limber voice still moves effortlessly between Ron's adolescent sarcasm and Harry's growing solemnity, from youthful exuberance to more philosophical gravity, "Deathly Hallows" is, for the most part, a somber book that marks Harry's final initiation into the complexities and sadnesses of adulthood. From his first days at Hogwarts, the young, green-eyed boy bore the burden of his destiny as a leader, coping with the expectations and duties of his role, and in this volume he is clearly more high-spirited war games of Quidditch have given way to real war, and Harry often wishes he were not the de facto leader of the Resistance movement, shouldering terrifying responsibilities, but an ordinary teenage boy -- free to romance Ginny Weasley and hang out with his friends. Harry has already lost his parents, his godfather Sirius and his teacher Professor Dumbledore (all mentors he might have once received instruction from) and in this volume, the losses mount with unnerving speed: at least a half-dozen characters we have come to know die in these pages, and many others are wounded or tortured. Voldemort and his followers have infiltrated Hogwarts and the Ministry of Magic, creating havoc and terror in the Wizard and Muggle worlds alike, and the members of various populations -- including elves, goblins and centaurs -- are choosing sides. No wonder then that Harry often seems overwhelmed with disillusionment and doubt in the final installment of this seven-volume. He continues to struggle to control his temper, and as he and Ron and Hermione search for the missing Horcruxes (secret magical objects in which Voldemort has stashed parts of his soul, objects that Harry must destroy if he hopes to kill the evil lord), he literally enters a dark wood, in which he must do battle not only with the Death Eaters, but also with the temptations of hubris and despair. Harry's weird psychic connection with Voldemort (symbolized by the lightning-bolt forehead scar he bears as a result of the Dark Lord's attack on him as a baby) seems to have grown stronger too, giving him clues to Voldemort's actions and whereabouts, even as it lures him ever closer to the dark side. One of the plot's significant turning points concerns Harry's decision on whether to continue looking for the Horcruxes -- the mission assigned to him by the late Dumbledore -- or to pursue the Hallows, three magical objects said to make their possessor the master of Death. Harry's journey will propel him forward to a final showdown with his arch enemy, and also send him backward into the past, to the house in Godric's Hollow where his parents died, to learn about his family history and the equally mysterious history of Dumbledore's family. At the same time, he will be forced to ponder the equation between fraternity and independence, free will and fate, and to come to terms with his own frailties and those of others. Indeed, ambiguities proliferate throughout "The Deathly Hallows": we are made to see that kindly Dumbledore, sinister Severus Snape and perhaps even the awful Muggle cousin Dudley Dursley may be more complicated than they initially seem, that all of them, like Harry, have hidden aspects to their personalities, and that choice -- more than talent or predisposition -- matters most of all. It is Ms. Rowling's achievement in this series that she manages to make Harry both a familiar adolescent -- coping with the frustrations of school and dating. This talent has enabled her to create a narrative that effortlessly mixes up allusions to Homer, Milton, Shakespeare and Kafka, with silly kid jokes about vomit-flavored candies, a narrative that fuses a plethora of genres (from the boarding-school novel to the detective story to the epic quest) into a story that could be Exhibit A in a Joseph Campbell survey of mythic archetypes. In doing so, J. K. Rowling has created a world as fully detailed as L. Frank Baum's Oz or J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle Earth, a world so minutely imagined in terms of its history and rituals and rules that it qualifies as an alternate universe, which may be one reason the "Potter" books have spawned such a passionate following and such fervent exegesis. With this volume, the reader realizes that small incidents and asides in earlier installments (hidden among a huge number of red herrings) create a breadcrumb trail of clues to the plot, that Ms. Rowling has fitted together the jigsaw-puzzle pieces of this long undertaking with Dickensian ingenuity and ardor. Objects and spells from earlier books -- like the invisibility cloak, Polyjuice Potion, Dumbledore's Pensieve and Sirius's flying motorcycle -- play important roles in this volume, and characters encountered before, like the house-elf Dobby and Mr. Ollivander the wandmaker, resurface, too. The world of Harry Potter is a place where the mundane and the marvelous, the ordinary and the surreal coexist. It's a place where cars can fly and owls can deliver the mail, a place where paintings talk and a mirror reflects people's innermost desires. It's also a place utterly recognizable to readers, a place where death and the catastrophes of daily life are inevitable, and people's lives are defined by love and loss and hope -- the same way they are in our own mortal world.

Allow me to begin by saying I refuse to spoil any part of any of these books for anyone for any reason. If you haven't read the books, stop here, buy them, read them, return... That being said, instead of detailing the book (as I normally would in a review) I'll recount my own experience: I pre-ordered this book when it first became available to do so. At that time, I had not read any of the books, but had seen the first four movies based upon the books. I promptly purchased the 6 books which precede the Deathly Hallows and read them.. the Order of the Phoenix I read three times, the Half Blood Prince I read twice and completed my second read one week prior to the release of the Deathly Hallows. I was intent on reading the series and this final book before anyone could spoil the ending for me. You see, I had already learned the fate of ... some of the characters involved in OOP and HBP, because there are people in this world who live off of the pleasure of ruining things for other people. I was determined to read the series and this final book before some loud mouth jerk could ruin it for me. I succeeded. With one week to go for the book release I began thinking that perhaps all these questions swelling inside of me - is Snape friend or foe? where are the horcruxes? will Harry live? - and so many other questions did not need answering. The magic of this series was in bringing out the discussion, the last few months (well over a year, actually) have had fans on the edges of their collective seats, casting about all kinds of theory and conjecture, ideas born of the tiniest details about mundance things. The magic - the true magic of it all - was in bringing together generations of readers in discussion about one of our era's literary masterworks. One week to go to get the book, and I was telling myself that I'd rather not read it, that I'd rather put it neatly on a shelf, so that no matter what happens to who, the magic would always live on, the dicussions would never end, the theories and conjectures would continue to bind readers together. A very noble, yet unrealistic notion, I agree. I had my fears that certain characters would die, and in not reading this book, I theorized that they would live forever if I never read about their deaths. The evening prior to the book's release, my daughter attended a Potter party at a Barnes & Noble book store. She is not a fan - she likes the movies, but she's not a fan of science fiction or fantasy, and has refused to read the books. Okay. She's entitled to her tastes. But she attended the party because some of her friends are Potter fans. I sat home, jealous that I wasn't a teenager and therefore way too old to attend a Potter party. I should have gone, I regret not going - the last of the Potter hooplas, the last Hallow's Ball. At any rate, my daughter brought home a wand and some Potter glow-in-the-dark eye glasses for me. I would like to have gone, but how sad is it to see a 40-something woman dressed as a witch for a Potter party? Perhaps not sad at all, but I feared being the oldest witch at the party... At midnight, I leaped from my seat and counted down the 60 seconds to the 12:01am mark of release of the book. My husband, who is use to my insane moments such as this, simply looked at me and nodded off. The next day - delivery day! - I cleaned every square inch of my house waiting for the UPS delivery van to pull up and bring me my book. I started cleaning at 8am... the book arrived at 4pm. A full day of scrubbing everything around me in a vain attempt to make the time go faster so that the book would finally arrive. I knew that once the book did arrive, nothing would get done. I had two hours to read the opening chapters of the book, because we had planned to make an excursion to a drive-in movie theater that evening to see the Order of the Phoenix movie. I very reluctantly put the precious book down for the evening. Sunday, July 22nd: the day I was able to spend every waking hour with Harry Potter and Co. I gathered the book, a bottle of water, a blanket and pillow, and headed out to my backyard where I have a hammock which hangs by a stream, overlooking a deep patch of woods. My own Forbidden Forest, of sorts. It is now Tuesday afternoon, and the book is completed. I spent some time re-reading chapters before completing the book, just to make sure I had fully absorbed everything. It is a wonderful book, it answers just about everything you'd want answered. There are some questions which are left open, and perhaps JKR did this to keep alive the discussions, or perhaps these questions are answered already (and the books need to be re-read). But mostly everything you'd want answered is indeed answered, albeit some things are way off from what many of us believed. Some, however, are right on. I recall several times yelling outloud, "I knew it!" There were MANY times when I sat here with a hand over my mouth, in stunned awe at what I was reading. And still, there were plenty of times I burst out crying. No disappointment in the way this book was written, the way the whole story comes to its fruition, or the way the characters who survive, survive. And that little "crack" that JKR says she slipped in there incase she wanted to return to the 'wizarding world?' Yes, I even liked that (I don't normally). It works. It all works. It all makes perfect sense, and it could not have ended any other way. Thank you - thank you - thank you - JKR. Thank you for such a wonderful fantasy, a wonderful world and this awesome, incredible boy, Harry Potter. Thank you.