… or as Mel’s current MSN name reads “HPATHBP is too frickin’ short!”

But first, an anecdote about how my family obtained the latest book in JK Rowling’s best-selling series on the very day it was released.

While waiting for the results of the contest organised by The Straits Times to celebrate their 160th anniversary, Mom popped by the Marine Parade branch of the National Library and conveniently noticed that there were a whole bunch of kiddos rushing for a certain book. She calls my sister, who is the real Potter fan in the house, and asks whether she wants to borrow a copy. Like DUH. So there, that’s how we got it.

For free! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
(And if we conveniently “lose” it…. which, of course, as my sister just informs me, will do us no good because the penalty will be the cost price anyway. And, as I hear from one of my catechism kids, the book’s now going for 7 pounds in London.)

That aside, I must admit that I did enjoy this book more than most (the only one I liked best would be the Prisoner of Azkaban - which I haven’t finished reading - but I watched the movie - which barely scratched the surface - but has a WEREWOLF as a main (and soon to be recurring) character! *pant pant*). Perhaps, for once, I didn’t feel like I was reading a children’s book with this one. The Harry Potter series, like many of the comic books of today, has grown with its original readers and the main characters are now reaching the end of their adolescence and not bumbling around with their teenage discoveries. Although the hormonal thing is pretty rampant in this book.

I personally enjoyed the darker overtones in this book - a result perhaps because kids in the UK have been rudely thrown into the “real world” with the terrorist attacks - heralding a suspect wave - shaking London to its very core. The darker overtones are in line with my kind of fantasy, where escapism isn’t about psychedelic, drug induced hallucinations, but rather a series of thinly veiled fables about life.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince fails as a stand-alone book, unlike its predecessors, but never claimed to be one in the first place. If anything, it just serves to set the stage for the supposed finale book in the series, which would undoubtedly feature the final showdown between Harry Potter and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.

(P.S. Does anyone NOT see the blatant similarities between Potter and Star Wars?)