OK, admitted, I am nuts. Together with about five dozen other people, I stood impatiently in line at 1:01am on July 16th to buy my brand new copy of “Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince”, the 6th installment in the 7-book-series.
Of course I could not – would not – wait for the badly translated German edition. When I was finished the next morning, I was plotting ways of breaking into Rowling’s house to steal the last, already written chapter of the 7th book. No doubt about it: the book is good, gripping and imaginative, its weaknesses are probably mostly due to the fact that it was still written with children as the main audience in mind, although “Half Blood Prince” is darker than any of its predecessors and surely unsuitable for most of its younger readers. Death is ubiquitous while the comic relief previously provided mainly by the Weasley twins is scarce to say the least. The war between good and evil is raging openly now. There are still a lot of teenage hormones raging – a concession to the fact that Harry and his friends are now 16, but these scenes only seem to interrupt the main plot of the new book: Harry’s quest to find out how he can vanquish a now immortal Lord Voldemort. The book centers on 3 persons: Harry, Voldemort and Professor Snape, the Potions Master and most enigmatic character of the series.
While the delving into Voldemort’s past to learn more about him with the aide of Dumbledore’s wondrous Pensieve remains one of the weaker points of the book (Rowling’s explanations for why Tom Riddle became the most evil of all wizards is a little too run of the mill to convince) the scenes with Snape are one of its strong points. He is definitely not one of the Cookie Cutter Characters that some of the others unfortunately often seem to be. While he has saved Harry’s life on more than one occasion, there are also hints that he really never gave up his allegiance to the Dark Lord. “Half Blood Prince” sure does not leave the reader any wiser, but instead with a subtle feeling that maybe there is more to him than meets the eye.
The book ends with an evil cliffhanger that makes you desperate to read the last book, not due for at least another two years. It absolutely is a book worth reading, especially as – while it still stands in that section – it is definitely no longer a children’s book.
The book “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood-Prince” by J. K. Rowling is published by Bloomsbury and costs 15,80 Euro.
Geschrieben von Sara Rieser
