Well, I finished it this morning and yes, the ending did manage to grab my attention a little more than the rest of the book -- although I still managed to put the book down just before the final showdown so I could go to sleep and then returned to it this morning.
The final showdown -- rather quick, in my eyes! They throw a spell at each other, Voldemort's knocked off his feet and then...oh, he's dead! But then I guess, there you go -- the most evil wizard ever, killed by his own spell.
Can't believe she killed off poor Hedwig! But, thinking in plot terms, she probably would have been an annoyance: Harry could hardly have taken her all around the country with him. Saying this though, Crookshanks and Pig were left behind somewhere...she could've done the same for Hedwig! And just when I was thinking, oh good, one twin loses an ear, she's done something to them now so she's not going to kill one of them off...damn! Fred is killed. I would've liked to have known George's reaction about that, those guys were
so close. Will he keep up with the joke shop? So much that we need to know still!
And Lupin and Tonks! Not both of them! Poor Ted...but then, like the last time Voldemort was at large and Harry was left as an orphan, now the same has happened this time around.
I was shocked when we found out that Harry had to die (although I knew there would be some loophole to it...but then, if Voldemort hadn't have used Harry's blood in book four, then Harry would have been quite screwed in book seven! At least, I think that's what J.K meant...Harry and Voldemort had a link because Harry was an inadvertent horcrux -- another surprise, I'd convinced myself that he wasn't one -- but then Voldemort created another link between them when he used Harry's blood...so the horcrux link is destroyed, but there's still the blood link that kept Harry alive. Oh, reading back now, because Lily's enchantment runs in Voldemort's veins and so Harry can't die while that's still hanging around. Right.) But, of course, J.K's had all this planned for a long time!
Yes, Molly's bit at the end was great. But we've seen her fury throughout the series whenever her family do something wrong, so it's not altogether surprising that she's a force to be reckoned with when wielding a wand at an enemy! And especially, as the boggart showed in book five, her deepest fear is the deaths of those in her family. And Neville killing the snake, that was another bit -- but I guessed, when Harry told him the snake had to be killed, than he would be the one to do it. Yeah, good old Neville.
OK, this post is getting rather long now. Suffice to say that although I haven't, since reading The Order of the Phoenix, enjoyed the books as I once did, and that I wasn't exactly
enthralled while reading this final book, the ending was certainly apt and enjoyable -- and also quite an eye opener to the ugliness and brutality of war.