Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

I read it and I am sad to let go of 7 years of waiting for the books and expecting them.  I got the book and read it in 2 days, seriously I couldn’t put it down.   7 books, many different characters and what felt like a lifetime of getting to know them and inviting these people and places inside my imagination.  Sometimes I think the reason, the Potter books were so successful was because you could escape reality and enter a magical world where things could fly and people could apparate to where they wanted.  Isn’t that the reason why we read fiction in general, for that few hours of going someplace life won’t let you go?  When I was younger I always felt safe with a book, excited and even involved in lives of other people, lives that were so different than mine, so much more exciting and to me it always felt real.

Alot of characters die in the last installment, (no spoilers, because I hate spoiling other people’s chances of discovering an ending on their own)  but there was closure.  An ending any differently may have made it difficult to let go, and perhaps at the end of the day one must remember that this is a children’s book to begin with.  They have to have closure,  it would be very difficult to write an open ended ambiguous ending for a child.  It would be like writing Cinderella and not knowing what would happen to her and Prince Charming, or ending it when she arrives home safely after her carriage turning into a pumpkin,  at least feeling that she ended up with her Prince leaves you thinking that happy endings exist in real life.

I am ranting and I don’t think I am being very coherent, but then again who cares?  Perhaps I am just trying to say goodbye to characters in a series of books, or trying to say goodbye to a past part of my life that I so dearly held on to.  Either way the feeling is the same, I was never good at goodbyes, especially when you know they will not be followed by a Hello even in a very distant future.  The journey of life sometimes takes you to places you do not wish to go with no return route.  Part of growing up is accepting that and getting along with that fact, no matter how hard you want to go back.