Might someone sit their exams without the second year of study?

I can't imagine it, at all. I mean, you've skipped half the subject matter. Even with real world experience, you'd need graders willing to give you points for saving the world.

Which mightn't be the hardest to find--but I can't imagine Hermione settling for that.

Our copy finally arrived from England Friday, and I finished late yesterday afternoon, though I read so fast toward the end that it amounted to skimming. I'm sure I'll catch all kinds of details I missed when I re-read.

Overall, I thought it was great, a fitting end to the series and a far better book than 5 or 6. I loved the fact the final battle is at Hogwarts, and everyone showing up for the fight made me tear up. That said, if it had been my story, I would've killed Ginny, just to get a death closer to the inner circle and because I always thought it was too pat and cloying for Harry and Hermione to BOTH become Weasleys-by-marriage. And I would've preferred an epilogue that talked more about what the trio was doing professionally and what they'd done to make the wizarding world a better place where any future Voldemorts would have a harder time rising to power. The kids could've been waving from their pictures on Hermione's desk--in my vision of the future, she's something like liaison to the Muggle prime minister at that point in her career. It's funny. I normally like happily-ever-after epilogues, but this one was too sweet for me and didn't give me the parts of the future I was most interested in.

But. It's not my story. It's not the first time I've second-guessed an author's choices, and I only do it when the story is good enough overall that I care what happens. E.g. I still haven't quite forgiven Bernard Cornwell for killing Teresa, but I still love the Sharpe books. Just one of the side-effects of writing for me--I think, "Why did s/he do it THAT way? I would've done X, Y, and Z." And then I remember that I write my own books at least in part to have the power of making the deaths, romantic pairings, etc. exactly to my tastes!

Anyway. Loved the book.

On both patronus quizzes, I got wolf, though DH and I long ago agreed my spirit animal is a border collie because I'm driven to make order out of chaos. Works for me.

The thing that struck me about the ending was that it was very clearly not a "Never Again" sort of ending. We've seen that it's already happened once -- Grindelwald was defeated, but it took only a few decades before Voldemort rose -- and there's nothing to tell us it won't happen again. Ron's "Grandpa Weasley will be heartbroken if you marry a pureblood" tells us that words like "pureblood" are still around and still mean something to someone -- if it's still something to joke about, then there's got to still be someone taking it seriously. There's still the Slytherin/Griffindor rivalry, for all the same reasons. I kept waiting for, somewhere in the middle of a paragraph of brief descriptions of people around the platform, a disheveled boy standing by himself -- just like Harry, and Tom Riddle, and Snape -- a kid who could go either way, depending on what happened in his next seven years.

That would have been a nice touch.

and there's nothing to tell us it won't happen again.

In the interview where JKR alludes to Harry and Ron becoming aurors she talks a bit about how they restructured the Ministry of Magic.

I think she was trying to strike a balance between what was appropriate for the ending of this novel, and knowing that she'll be publishing her backstory materials about the Potterverse which will go into greater detail about everybody's life.

I think she said Luna would be something like a magical naturalist.

Anyway, it strikes me as being similar to the choices that were made with the LoTR movies. Things were shot knowing that they wouldn't be in the theatrical release, but that they would be in the DVD extended editions.

I'm increasingly unsure how I feel about all this noncanonical canon of Rowling's

Yeah, Lucas much?

If there's still a need for aurors, there are still dark wizards, and so a Big Damn Evil can raise his (or her) again.

Peacock is a perfect patronus for Fay. I took one quiz and came out Wolf, which is cool, but I'm not sure it's really me. Probably one week a month it's me.

I thought DH was much better written than HBP and possibly OotP.

The problem with these patronus quizzes is they can't possibly predict the menagerie needed to represent the buffistas. Camels and badgers and monkeys! Oh my!

She only made minor tweaks to it for publication.

I think it was on the MSNBC website that she said she had a version that listed all the babies that had been born in the ensuing years but she thought it was too listy.

The Bonham Carter interview is online here: [link]

And here's Radcliffe talking about DH: [link]

That's Neville ? Whoa.

Matthew Lewis is going to be at DragonCon, so I'll happily report back on his hotness. He was supposed to be there last year, and almost all of the Harry Potter people had to cancel (because of filming, I think).

The thing that struck me about the ending was that it was very clearly not a "Never Again" sort of ending.

I thought it was ambiguous--Harry said "all was well," but the world didn't seem much changed--but I wasn't sure JKR meant for me to take it that way or not.

In general, I like non-"Never Again" endings because they are, after all, realistic. And I would've been happy with either type for this story--I just didn't like the epilogue we got!