I’ve been hearing whispers for months about how a hacker had supposedly managed to steal an electronic copy of the manuscript for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Not watching much TV these days, I wasn’t aware of it, but according to Gavroche, the theft is now being reported in the mainstream news.
A lot of people have been trying to figure out what’s going to happen in this story. Does Harry defeat Voldemort? What role does Neville play in this? Is Dumbledore really dead? Do Ron and Hermione stop fighting and fall in love? I suppose this theft, if it really did happen, could be someone’s way of finding out the answers to those questions.
Just to settle the debate once and for all, here are the book’s highlights:
The climatic scenes take place in Voldemort’s lair, a castle which magically floats above the clouds. (The reason nobody has been able to locate his hideout is because England has a lot of clouds.)
The big surprise in this book comes after Harry challenges Voldemort to a wizards duel. The fight doesn’t go well for Harry and he crawls out on a ledge to get away from Voldemort. He’s already lost his hand at this point and then Voldemort drops the big bomb, “Harry, I am your father.”
Harry screams “Noooooo” and leaps into the void. He manages to catch himself on a branch sticking out from the bottom of the castle and hangs on until Hermione brings the Millennium Falcon to rescue him.
And that’s where the book ends. After that, there’s a brief paragraph from J.K. Rowling in which she explains that there was so much more to write that she needs to keep the Harry Potter franchise alive for at least one more book. She also announces her plans to write a series of Harry Potter prequels. These stories will chronicle the original rise of Tom Riddle in far more detail than in The Half-Blood Prince and will follow James and Lily Potters’ time at Hogwarts.