Harry Potter and the

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
Warning: this review contains substantial spoilers
A few years ago, when Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire won the Hugo award, a number of people were upset at what they considered a light-weight book winning the award. I admit that I, too, was a tad annoyed. But I hadn’t yet read the book, and when I did I was much less upset. Rowling’s books improved over the years. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s [or Philosopher’s] Stone was a well-done, fun kid’s book. But by the time she reached Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the books were becoming deeper and more serious. Since then, each book has been far more serious and deeper, and the characters have had to face real challenges. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the latest in the series, continues this trend. It’s another good book from Rowling. It, like all of her books, has its flaws (more on this later in the review), but overall the interesting story, good characters, and wealth of interesting detail makes up for this.
At the end of the previous book (Order of the Phoenix), the wizard world came to accept that Lord Voldemort had returned. In Half-Blood Prince, the war in the wizard world expands, to the point that some of it is noticed in the non-magical (muggle) world. Harry returns to Hogwarts, but a Hogwarts that is under tight security. The rest of the book really has two major threads: Harry knows that Draco Malfoy is up to something, and that Professor Snape is involved. He tries to figure out what Malfoy is doing. At the same time, Dumbledore enlists Harry’s help to track down Voldemort’s Horcruxes, which are objects in which Voldemort has stored part of his soul (and thus the source of his immortality). Rowling also uses this as an opportunity to fill in parts of Voldemort’s history, something she also did a bit of in the last book. In the end, the two pieces come together in spectacular fashion and result in the biggest shock in the series so far: the death of Dumbledore. (I warned you above that there would be substantial spoilers. If you are still reading, don’t complain.)
Dumbledore’s death is in fact not only spectacular but leaves some major points to be cleared up in the next book. Dumbledore, returning with Harry from a mission in which he has been substantially weakened (perhaps fatally, and that’s one of the questions), is cornered by Malfoy, whose mission it turns out was to kill him. Yet Dumbledore is unafraid, and in fact tells Malfoy that he is not a killer. Malfoy, in tears since Voldemort has threatened to kill his family, begins to stand down when Snape and several death eaters arrive. (Harry, meanwhile, is invisible and frozen by Dumbledore.) Dumbledore turns to Snape and begins pleading, and Snape kills him.
But the real question remains – has Snape gone over to Voldemort. Or was Dumbledore’s pleading with Snape for Snape to kill him. (The words he uses aren’t specific.) It would certainly solve several problems. It saves Malfoy, who either had to kill Dumbledore and thus be beyond redemption or be himself killed by Voldemort. And it saves Snape, who had made an unbreakable oath to protect and help Malfoy. Moreover, there is also the possibility that Dumbledore has absorbed the Horcrux and that his death (which may have been inevitable) destroys part of Voldemort. What, if any, of this speculation is true must wait for the next book to be revealed.
But this brings me to a complaint about the characters in the series. At times, characters don’t tell one another things that could have changed how things turn out. After Dumbledore’s death, Harry vows to kill Snape. He’s hated Snape all along, and now all of his suspicions, he thinks, have been confirmed. And other key wizards agree. But part of this is because Dumbledore, who has always trusted Snape, has never actually told anyone why he trusts him so implicitly. If he did, the characters may at least have raised some of the questions I did above. But this sort of thing has been true in other Rowling books also. Some character (often Harry) knows something that, if he were to tell the write person, would make the situation better. There are even other instances of it in this book, such as Harry not revealing it immediately when he finds out where Malfoy has been hiding or Harry not telling Dumbledore about the writings he has found of the “Half-Blood Prince.” Perhaps some of this is realistic (though I don’t think that Dumbledore being so closed mouthed about Snape, even with Harry to whom he has revealed just about everything else is), but it still can be irritating.
One other flaw that this book shares with some of the earlier books in the series is that it’s somewhat overwritten. Rowling could cut about ten percent of most of her books, and the books would be better for it. This tends to be especially true in transition, where she’ll ramble along with minor transitional material (the characters walking down the stairs discussing their school books or whatever) that could simply have been cut. I don’t think this is a major flaw, and it’s one shared by other good writers, from Dickens to King (though their ways of overwriting are different – and in Dickens’s case, more central to the effect he’s creating), but I do at times wish she’s edit herself a bit more.
Overall, though, this is a very good book. It won’t be on my Hugo nominating ballot, though that’s in large part because this has been a very good year for SF and fantasy, and there are a lot of good books out there this year. It might have been on my ballot in a year that didn’t have quite so many great books, and it’s certainly on my list of the 20 best books of the year.
(As a side note, I will have one Harry Potter piece on my Hugo nominating ballot: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire will be one of my nominations for Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form.