Someone Understands

More and more people are emerging from their Harry Potter cocoons with that same hanging look of disappointment that I experienced. It's that same feeling you get after eating an entire pint of Ben and Jerry's or package of oreos: unsatisfied, slightly ill, and sad that it's gone.

Fortunately for us, Mark Lotto has elocuted that feeling in what may be the most accurate book review I've ever read.

Highlights:

It’s the fantasy novel Faulkner might have dashed off when drunk and hard up for cash, with pivotal, familiar events revisited from new and semi-surprising points of view.

Good vs. evil, even accompanied by supernatural adventure and thrills, holds our attention less well than you might think. We were really in it for the embarrassment of funny, superior, domestic details—of which any list of mine would be a small start, but to begin with: the possibility of getting mail via owl post rather than the USPS, of commuting via fireplace rather than the MTA, of de-gnoming Mom’s garden instead of raking the leaves, of taking potions classes instead of precalculus.

...Too many funerals and a siege of Hogwarts significantly shorter but only slightly less violent than that of Leningrad...

When we do return to Potter, idly, occasionally, on vacation maybe, dipping into a series favorite between other, more serious reads, there won’t be the same … It will lack a certain—let’s not call it “magic.”

We all grow up to be Muggles, in the end.

Sigh, back to work, then.