Still More Harry Potter

Well, OK, I finally finished Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. So this is going to be something in the nature of a book review, I guess. But I'll try to avoid spoilers for the moment.

Anyway, I definitely enjoyed this installment. The writing and the story elements really are getting more sophisticated as the series goes on, and that's something I very much appreciate. In this one, Harry and his friends come across very believably as real teenagers. Hogwarts feels enough like a real school to give me a few uncomfortable flashbacks to my own high school days. The Dursleys are far less cartoonish and boring than they have been (something that really bugged me in the previous books). And there is an increasing sense of a larger wizarding world out there beyond Hogwarts, with its own politics and a variety of adult concerns that Harry is only just starting to become aware of. Good trends, all.

At 850 pages plus, I can't help but think the book wouldn't have been hurt by a certain amount of editing, but it never dragged badly enough to become annoying, and the last few chapters flew by at a breakneck pace that kept me reading until well past what should have been my bedtime. It didn't have quite the same kind of intricate mystery-story plotting that we mostly got in the earlier books, but there were enough mysteries, large and small, to keep up a decent feeling of suspense through the whole thing.

In a way, though, having finished the book, I almost feel a little disappointed. Not because there was anything wrong with it, simply because I'm left with a feeling of wanting more. The series is clearly building up to something very, very big, to an ultimate confrontation, surely, between Harry and Voldemort. In the end, though, that's all Order of the Phoenix really is: build-up. It's good build-up, but it leaves me hungry for a climax, and I don't want to have to wait two more books and who-knows-how-many years for it! But then, I never was any good at delayed gratification, I admit.

There are plenty of other things I could say about the book, but I think I've gone on enough for one post, and, in any case, if I wanted to talk about stuff in more detail, it really ought to be in a separate post labeled with spoiler warnings. So I'll just say one more thing before I go: Snape is cool. I don't care what Harry thinks, he is. So there!