So, Deathly Hallows! Woooo!
Holy mother of god, was that sappy. Seriously. With all her rambling about how "two die, one gets a reprieve" and Harry marching off to die, I thought she was referring to the Trio with that comment and that only Harry makes it out. But no, it's just a device so she can put the denoument chat with Dumbledore before the actual climax. Weird.
In general, I am pleased. I was surprised that both Draco and Snape were redeemed, I really didn't think she'd give us both. (Draco has realized that he is way out of his league, and that his league is shifty. If he were more personally involved maybe he would have been more obvious or more useful about being redeemed, but whatever.) She really had me going on Snape, though, I was kinda giving up on him. But I had Draco pegged from the first scene in Malfoy Manor.
Speaking of Snape, I like the Lily/Snape thing, but I'm not sure I buy it as a overwhelming motivation. I think Snape saw that a lot of things were wrong with Voldie, it just took it hitting home to sink in. Thanks to his acting talents, however, everyone turns out pretty well.
MWPP really took one for the team, didn't they? MWPP+L,S are all dead. Oh well. Time for a new generation and all that.
I do really like the idea of the afterlife as a giant Room of Requirement, that was a nice touch.
About 60% of this book was fight scene, it's going to be bitchingly expensive as a movie. Oh well. The aerial fight at the start. The Lestrange vault. The entire end battle.
I do like how she didn't shy away from the "giant battle of Hogwarts ends it all" trope, even if thousands of people wrote that scene before she could get around to it.
I would be kinda interested in knowing how much of it all she had planned out from the very beginning. Did she think of the Hallows first (well, after thinking of Harry), and then fill in an intervening 6 years? Or did she fall back on stuff she set up in the previous books to do a new one? I think it is somewhat more the latter than the former.
Ahahahaha, Voldemort as a Harmonian = best best best thing ever! This book plus the OotP movie have made me like Voldemort a lot more. He's way less lame than he used to be.
I wasn't affected very much by Lupin or Fred's deaths, which I guess are the two bigger ones that she was talking about. I kinda missed that Lupin died until a couple of pages later when I had to back up and check, wait, Lupin died? I think Snape's would mean more on a re-read, I wasn't feeling too sad for him when Nagini nabbed him.
And my comments on the OBHWF-esque nature of the epilogue can be summed up in the icon. Hey, she said she's not writing any more books, so generation 3 is fair game! Actually, they all are. Nobody knows if the cat is dead or alive until you open the box, and if you ignore the box, it can be dead, alive, or purple-spotted! What is this "canon" nonsense you speak of?
I mean, seriously, why bother to redeem Draco and then saddle him with a wife? He defied the Death Eaters to get out of having to marry some pureblood girl his parents picked out, you silly author!