Book the seventh is done, and approved of. Josh may disagree but I don’t find much fault with his arguments: he’s a much more critical and aware reader than I am. Michael and Prairie liked it, as did AKMA. junk science @ PAB, not so much.
Is it candy? Hmm, yes, sort of, but there’s a lot of it. The whole series must be around 3,000 pages, so the fact that ten and unders are reading it is pretty good. So it does no more than build up their stamina for more long form reading, that can’t be bad.
No spoilers but allusions and references below the fold.
But I think the 7th was too long and had too much delay before the finale. The finale was, I thought, well done, even if the King’s Cross bit was a bit odd. I think the two of them wandering around a motionless tableau of the scene in the forest might have been as effective and less distracting.
The final “do you feel lucky, punk? Well, do ya?” scene was a great summation of the underlying themes about knowledge without wisdom, of power without prudence or responsibility. Greed, narcissism, cowardice, forged by shame, driven by arrogance all makes for quite a villain. And seeing some of the characters come into their own in those last scenes, taking down villains we’ve wanted dead since book 5 or wanted to see win since book 1, was good.
As a whole, it works pretty well, much better than some of the earlier books, but this is really the first one that came to mind, many years ago, if the stories are true. The ending came into Rowling’s mind as a young neglected boy came alive on the page. So while there may have been some missteps getting there, the ending was worthwhile.