So much for Harry

So it's over, it's all over. I read the final installment of our dear Harry Potter. Now, how do I go about trying to write a decent review without any spoilers? Hmmm.
Well I am vey happy and impressed with the ending and the final wrapping up, although there are some things I had hoped to see at the end and that are absent, leaving me with the feeling that these small matters are a little unresolved. My comfort is from the fact that I can always turn to fanfic for a decently projected solution to these feelings of incomplete details.
But, overall, the ending was as it should be, the climax was cleanly set up, the finale was right. It wasn't that there needed to be surprise. Maybe the intention was to surprise and shock many of the readers, but the sense I got was that although I didn't predict much to turn out the way that it did, to solve things a certain way, there was a sense of familiarity to it all. While I may not have seen much of it coming, it slid along well with the attitude of, well of course Harry is doing that, that's the kind of think Harry does. The best way to say it is that the story stayed true to its character and its characters. Harry was himself, and so was the story.
And the treatment by the author of the final interplay between the protagonist and the antagonist? That, too, though no one really could have predicted it entirely, was as it should be.
When the hero and the villain come to the end of a very long series, it is a great author's responsibility to be real, to be reasonable, and to resolve. I think Rowling is a great author and I think she did her duty. The whole book is painful, never letting up and never being less than perfectly real. The interaction is reasonable, it is honest about humanity as the plot has always been. And it resolved. The most important questions were answered. Catharsis was pushed if not reached. We felt all the humor, what could be left of it at this point. We felt all the tragedy and cruelty. We saw heroic people at their best and we were crushed with them in their woes. We got angry when people did stupid or unfair things. And we celebrated whenever something went right, no matter how small and no matter how much more of the great journey remained.

I was able for the last time to slip into Harry's world and feel everything with him, and to wonder, as he did what would happen. Now that world is dead to me. With the closing of the story, I can no longer be part of it. I can no longer wonder about the many plot lines and predict what the next book will reveal, because there can be no next book. That is the truly sad thing. To those of you who haven't read it yet and don't know whether or not the boy lives, that actually isn't important. There is no way to follow him any further, nor any of the others. With the final words of the book they go their way and I go mine.
A story like this is once in a life time. There are other stories and many surpass this one in different ways. There will be more still, and some will bring me the same feelings of camraderie with the plot that Harry did. Some will be so rich as to engulf me in a world like the one I entered for seven books here. Some will be this well written and yet simply expressed enough that Children can access and understand even as Adults are drawn in and not bored.
I hope to write something like that. I have never thought before of writing a series. But such a thing is possible. All of my favorites wrote series, and I hope to be my best. Perhaps the greatest extent is among their lot.
Finally, the last connection I can have with my newly departed friends in Harry's world is that I can learn from them. I have learned the value of bravery, of doing what is right, of applying my education to a great adventure. And I have been charged to be myself. I hope that the climax of my life will be a moment in which I do my duty and stay true to my character. I hope that my own life will be real, reasonable and resolved.