Deathly news

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is set to be released July 21.

This is about a problem that I hadn't thought of but was interesting: Acquiring libraries must contractually agree to keep their copies secret until the release date.

So you know thousands of people at libraries and bookstores and maybe even UPS shippers are going to know all before we do.

And, amazingly, that business with the idiot god-addled woman trying to ban Harry from the Gwinnett County, Georgia, public schools is still going on. Now she's in court.

Now, I have a very liberal-minded friend who lives in Georgia. In fact, in Cobb County, the birthplace of much of the American theocracy and Dominionist movements. And the place of the famous anti-evolution creationist biology textbook stickers. So I won't bash Georgia. Or even Texas, since they have Austin. Calling attention is enough.

OK, so I'll go on record with my predictions about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, to be released on this coming July 21st.

The fun part will be returning to this post and seeing what I got right. The interesting part will certainly be all that I got wrong. So I'm hoping to be mostly wrong:

Yeah, Dumbledore is really dead. But he will continue to influence Harry via some discovered communication.

Snape will die in an act of heroism that morally redeems his character.

Neville continues to develop as a parallel character to Harry. Recall that the prophesy could have referred to either. And I saw other parallels and contrasts between them. I think this means Neville has to buy it, since Rowling can't possibly kill off Harry.

Draco will remain, to the end, in morally dubious and unresolved territory. Rawling, it seems to me, is actually quite comfortable with ambiguity in a good yarn.

"The Deathly Hallows" is a reference to the horcruxes, or, in a syntactical play with words, the ceremony to create them.

Draco becomes a werewolf, via Fenrir Greyback. I'm so hugely going out on a limb here. There were many presentiments of the story in the other books, and she has presaged so much with hints before. But I'll look a fool if I'm wrong and it turns out that Rawling was just drawing on her own stock phrases and images in two different contexts.

We'll see. Like I said, the fun part will be the July post. I hope I'm wrong - she tells a better story than I ever could.


Earlier: Twelve million.