[Ghoulish Delight]

I finished reading yesterday. I'll leave in depth discussion/speculation to the experts. I've read through each book exactly once and don't know the minutia well enough to discuss much.

I enjoyed it, significantly more than I enjoyed book 4. Of course, I'm a big Empire Strikes Back fan, so it's no surprise that I look at iSm's scathing review and say, "Hell yeah, that's what I like about this one!" Expositional, really pushes the story forward, perhaps not a lot of action (but good action when it's there), and ends on downer. My kind of sequel.

I'm not fan of the miscommunicaiton/misunderstanding genre of romance, so the Ron and Hermione thing bugged me. But it's such a common device in all fiction everywhere that I ignore it now.

I think this book had a good mixture of things that she gave you enough clues to figure out and things that she gave you enough clues to lead you astray. For instance, I figured out early on that it was Dumbledore that Malfoy was supposed to kill (confirmed when the bottle of wine meant for Dumbledore was poisoned) and that Snape was the Half Blood Prince (who else would be that good at potions...and she was hinting way to strongly for it to be Harry's mom). Conversely, I was expecting Ginny to die (I knew someone was going to die), and I was expecting it to be revealed that Snape had made an Unbreakable Vow with Dumbledore (which presumeably would take precedent over any contradictary Vow he makes afterwards). Of course, based on some theories, that may still be true.

One point of contention I had was that during the there were 3, count them, 3 people under the effects of the luck potion outside the Room of Requirement. 3. And Malfoy was able to successfully get past them with no problem. I found that a little odd. The extent of their luck was the killing curses didn't hit them, but we were shown with Harry's experience that they SHOULD have been able to intuitively avoid something like Malfoy's little darkness trick thanks to the potion. (I didn't go through all the spoilers in the other thread, so forgive me, and link me, if this has been discussed).