For some reason unknown to myself, I was actually awake at 7:30 this morning, so I was able to do my usual "let's stroll into town and get a cheap copy somewhere without pre-ordering or losing sleep" trick. Morrisons opened at 8am and had it for £5. Can't complain.
(SPOILER)What surprised me most was that Harry himself was actually a Horcrux. I've heard that theory banded about a fair bit over the past two years or so and my impression was that people had generally dismissed it, given how difficult and inadvisable it is to make a living being a Horcrux. I did have a sneaking suspicion initially, but had actually not expected it in the book itself.
The Snape and Lily chapter towards the end was really quite nice, I thought. I think it really gave the reader a complete picture of Snape, finally settling over whether he was a villain or not. While I didn't expect something like that and was unsure what to make it of it initially, having thought about it I generally found it to be positive.
I read somewhere that someone thought the epilogue read like bad fanfiction and I'd really have to say that that appraisal isn't too far off in my opinion. I didn't like it it just didn't seem right to be honest. I was quite disappointed by the epilogue in all honesty. Perhaps it was a nice touch for some people, but I just found it to be a tad annoying and unnecessary.
One of my favourite bits were the scenes in the Ministry. I think that was nice firstly because it's always good to bring Umbridge in somewhere as well as showing the effects that the war was having on the general wizarding population. It's too easy sometimes to just show how an event changes the lives of the main characters showing only glimpses of how John and Joan Smith are dealing with the crisis that Britain is facing, whereas I think Rowling deliberately gave the 'general public' a lot of exposure to great effect.
What I did like about the book in particular was how some of the secondary and tertiary characters throughout the series were given more focus than before. Characters like Kreacher, Ollivander and Griphook in particular. I also got a laugh out of how frequently Dawlish was mentioned during the book. It was also quite nice that Rowling didn't shy away from a rather cliché 'but any characters that were named generally survived' result in the Battle of Hogwarts. The scenes at Hogwarts at the end were a rather fitting finale, I think. I'm unsure what I make of the chapter when Harry basically does what Ash did in the first Pokemon film, to be truthful. It was quite nice to have a link back to Dumbledore given how his image had been repeatedly tarnished through the book (which incidentally was another nice touch, I think).
Ultimately, the greatest tragedy of all was Dobby.
I generally enjoyed the book, I'm not quite sure how I'd compare it to the others, I guess I'll have to either re-read it or just generally think on it some more.
