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Harry Potter launch Magical night for wizard's army of fans

JANE BRADLEY

Go grab your copy of the Harry Potter No. 6

If you wake up before 6.30 am and are reading this, poke your nose out of your window. You might see owls flying around with copies of Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince clutched in their claws. Tightly shut boxes containing the books that have been clearly marked, "Do not open before midnight," will have been broken open.

By the time the stores open their doors to a book buying frenzy, a lucky few will be halfway through the book. And our 15-year-old correspondent in Edinburgh, Trisha Mittal, will be writing about her meeting with JK Rowling.

By noon tomorrow the identity of the Half-blood Prince will be known. Don't be surprised if you get an SMS from a crazed muggle giving away a secret that has been guarded more assiduously than the gold at Fort Knox. People have been arrested for trying and a store in Canada, which gave away copies a few days ago, recalled the books and promised the early bird owners the world in exchange for their silence.

By the evening, notices for a prayer meeting or two may be up if the bookies are proven right and Dumbledore cops it.

A magical day for Harry Potter fans

'Half-Blood Prince' flies off shelves at a supernatural speed

Now it's time to start reading.

Harry Potter mania emerged yet again at midnight, with eager fans in Great Britain, the United States, Canada and other lands filling bookstores for the Saturday launch of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," the latest in J.K. Rowling's chronicle of the boy wizard.

"I can't believe that I have the first copy," 20-year-old Rachel Grandy -- who had waited in line at New York's Union Square Barnes & Noble for 16 hours -- told The Associated Press. "It's totally boggling my mind right now."

"I'm not getting any sleep tonight," a giddy, witch-hat-topped girl told CNN in London, England, as she clutched her copy of "Prince." "I'll be reading all night."

Isabel Sen, a Potter fan who appeared on CNN Saturday morning from New York, was already up to Chapter Five after buying her book at a midnight opening. She and her sister Emily would have stayed up all night to read it except for her father, she said.

"We tried [to keep reading]," she said, "but we had [the book] forcibly taken from us."

Saturday the yeoman's work will be done by postal and overnight package services, which will deliver more than 2 million "Prince" pre-orders to customers all over the world. Moreover, bookstores may sell 10 million copies in the first 24 hours, according to an estimate by the British bookstore chain Waterstone's.

But fair warning: The new book, the sixth in the planned seven-book series, is the darkest yet.

Early reviews, by selected reviewers fortunate enough to receive a rare advance copy, have noted the death of an important character and a general tone of foreboding.

The book has "a thoroughly harrowing denouement that sees the death of yet another important person in Harry's life, and that renders this, the sixth volume of the series, the darkest and most unsettling installment yet," wrote New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani in Saturday's editions.

"You get a lot of answers in this book," Rowling, a resident of Edinburgh, Scotland, said as she arrived at Edinburgh Castle for a special midnight reading before thousands of adoring fans. (See story.) "I can't wait for everyone to read it."

Isabel Sen was already enraptured -- and a little nervous.

"I've only read four chapters and I'm already shocked," she said.

Amazing numbers

Scholastic, the book's American publisher, is printing a record 10.8 million copies of "Prince." That dwarfs the previous record of 8.5 million copies boasted by the book's predecessor, 2003's "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix."

The book has sat in the No. 1 spot on Amazon.com's best seller list since it was announced late last year.

"Prince" has worldwide pre-orders of more than 2 million copies, 1.4 million from Amazon alone. Half of those are in the United States, so many that the United Parcel Service and the U.S. Postal Service are teaming up to deliver them all.

As with past Harry Potter releases, a few slipped out early: 14 in Vancouver, British Columbia; one in upstate New York; and two, allegedly, in Indianapolis, Indiana. A digital image of an alleged page from the book -- one revealing a character's death -- has been making the rounds of e-mail.

Security was extremely tight, with booksellers selling "Prince" before Saturday in their respective time zones facing the wrath of Rowling's publishers, if not the publishers' attorneys.

"There is a huge amount of security around the book right up to the moment the clock strikes midnight," Richard Cristofoli, an executive at British bookseller W.H. Smith, told Reuters last week.

In London, security precautions extended to the bookstores themselves in the wake of the July 7 terrorist bombings that shook the city.

W.H. Smith canceled a planned midnight launch at King's Cross Station, the site of the deadliest of the terrorist attacks. King's Cross is the home of Platform 9 3/4, the traditional departure point for Harry and his friends as they take the train to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry at the beginning of each term.

However, bookstore operators wanted to make clear that it was "business as usual," in the words of John Webb, a children's buyer at Waterstone's.

"London's open for business and we want to celebrate this book," Webb told the AP. The chain reported 300,000 people attended midnight openings at more than 100 stores across Britain.

British bookstores also used the book as an excuse for an old-fashioned price war. Many bookstores are selling the book for about half its 16.99 (about $29.75) cover price; Amazon's UK affiliate, for example, was offering it for 8.99 ($15.75). (The U.S. cover price is $29.99.)

Excitement

U.S. bookstores had a festive atmosphere.

In New York, the Barnes & Noble Union Square location used a person dressed as an owl -- the preferred messenger in Rowling's books -- to hand over the first box of books to cashiers. In Beaverton, Oregon, a Powell's bookstore offered fire walkers.

Books 'N' More in Wilmington, Ohio, featured horses dressed up as unicorns parading down the main street, and everywhere bookstore workers (and customers) came as Harry, Headmaster Albus Dumbledore, instructor Severus Snape, groundskeeper Hagrid and other Potter characters.

"What's not to like?" 14-year-old Emily Smith, waiting at the Norcross, Georgia, Barnes & Noble store, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "I love fantasy books. I love magic and dragons."

"Prince" is the second-to-last novel in the Potter series. Its serialization has helped the book's popularity, says Philip Nel, who teaches a Harry Potter course at Kansas State University.

"This is a very long mystery novel we are getting in installments," he told USA Today. "Each book ends with some suspense. You want to know what happens next."

"There's nothing quite like Harry Potter in publishing," Bookseller magazine children's book expert Caroline Horn told Reuters.

Now that the wait for Book Six is over, Potter fans are ready to bury their noses in their copies. They're confident they're going to get a good story.

"If you can write five goods books in a row, you can write six good books in a row," 10-year-old William Hilkert told the AP.

The Harry Potter movies have been made by Warner Bros. The studio, like CNN, is a division of Time Warner.

Growing up with Harry Potter

Columnist glad that his little girl hasn't outgrown J.K. Rowling's books

RALEIGH, N.C. -

<>getCSS("3053751") < = src="https://www.india-forums.com/js/video-tease.js"> <> Slide show • Fans pack bookstores around the world to buy the sixth book about the boy wizard's adventures.

I was beginning to worry that my 12-year-old daughter might have outgrown Harry Potter — or at least the excitement of Harry.

When "The Order of the Phoenix" came out two years ago, Miana insisted we pre-order three months in advance. She begged my wife, Linda, to sew her a black Hogwarts robe, and we spent hours whittling her a wand — with a whisker from our cat, Bear, as its "magical core." We spent three hours at Borders playing games, doing face-painting and waiting in line to be one of the first with a book.

But as Saturday's midnight release of "The Half-Blood Prince" approached, Miana, now a rising seventh grader, wasn't even sure she wanted to deal with all that. Two years and 26 days was a long time to be away from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, so we'd had to find other ways to feed our fantasy.

Miana started with Eoin Colfer's "Artemis Fowl" series, with its fairies, goblins and pixies. Then we introduced her to J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy — an epic tale of good and bad wizards, of dragons and trolls and goblins and elves, and of a resurgent "dark lord."

It was the perfect parallel to Potter, and Miana ate it up. For months, she could talk of nothing but enchanted rings, magic swords and elvish runes, and she seemed to have little time for Harry and his friends.

Her Hogwarts robe sat balled up in a corner of her closet, wrinkled and forgotten.

Then, about three weeks ago, she asked if I could call Borders and see what they had planned for this year. When I told her the clerk had promised "crazy, crazy fun," she asked if we could sign up.

Miana began marking the passage of time in weeks or days "TH" — 'til Harry. On Thursday, Miana called me at work to finalize our plans, which by now included her two best friends, Katie and Amanda.

"I hope I can sleep tonight," she said. "Maybe I should take a Benadryl."

She did. But, in our defense, she DID have a stuffy nose.

Friday morning, I jumped in the car and drove to Borders to be there when they opened at 9 o'clock and get a low number for the line to pick up our book at midnight. When I returned home, Miana and Linda were waiting at the door.

"What number did we get?" Miana asked.

"They said we'd have to come back later," I said. "But I have a couple of surprises to tide you over."

I made a big show of pulling out a box of Bertie Bott's Every Flavor beans (with new flavors rotten egg and bacon), a chocolate frog complete with wizard trading card and ... a purple ticket with the number "0001."

Miana danced around the kitchen chanting, "We're No. 1! We're No. 1!"

She and her friends exchanged phone calls throughout the day to confer on wardrobes and hairstyles. Katie, with her beautiful red hair and a black graduation robe from Goodwill, would be Ginny Weasley. Amanda, with a purple robe and her hair dyed raven-black, would be Harry's crush, Cho Chang.

Linda had spent the evening before braiding Miana's hair to achieve that Hermione Granger frizziness.

"I'm hyper, I'm hyper," Miana said, bouncing up and down. "Today can't go by fast enough!"

But when we got to the store around 9:30 p.m., the girls were already wondering whether they'd made a mistake dressing up. So few seemed to be in costume this year.

As the minutes ticked by toward midnight, the three sat in a corner of the bookstore, eating oversized chocolate chip cookies and thumbing through a stack of J-14 and Tiger Beat magazines for the latest gossip on Orlando Bloom and Lindsay Lohan. Their minds seemed to be on anything but a boy with a lightning scar on his forehead.

"Am I having fun yet?" Miana asked with that look of ennui that only a tween can muster. "Because if I am, my face hasn't caught up with my brain."

Maybe we just should've gone to Wal-Mart at midnight and dispensed with all the hoopla. Twelve suddenly seemed much too old for face-painting and hat-making.

Then the store manager announced it was time to line up.

"Well," Miana said, giving me a shove. "Get in line, buddy." Soon she had grabbed my cell phone and was counting down the minutes.

At 11:55, Linda turned to me with a sad expression on her face.

"I'm already dreading the day when we finish the book," she said. "Because then it will be over again."

"Are you going to cry?" Miana asked with a look that said, "You'd better not."

When the manager announced at 11:58 that the books were being brought up to the registers, Miana was up on her tiptoes dancing a jig.

"It's 12 o'clock, it's 12 o'clock, it's 12 o'clock," she said, handing me back the phone. "Get your ticket."

A couple of minutes later, Miana was leaving the store, the new book clutched tightly to her chest. As we drove home under a brilliant yellow half moon, we listened to the book on compact disc.

The three girls who just a few hours earlier couldn't have cared less about witches and warlocks sat transfixed in the back seat, not uttering a word.

Newfoundlanders first in North America to get new Potter book

Aparecium.

In the world of wizards, the spell would make visible what once was not, but mere muggles had to wait until one minute past midnight for the latest adventure of boy wizard Harry Potter.

In robes, with wands, on brooms, fans of all ages gathered in full Potter regalia at more than 300 late-night parties across the country to await the witching hour.

"I'm going to go home and read," said Laura Stevens, 14, with a fresh copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in her arms outside the Chapters in St. John's, Nfld. "I don't want to wait until morning because I won't be able to sleep."

Readers in the easternmost province were the first in North America to see the book, with a half-hour head start on the Maritime provinces and an hour and a half on Quebec, Ontario and New York.

Many stores across Canada stayed open late into the night so eager readers could get copies exactly at 12:01 a.m.

As he waited to crack the cover of the first book sold in Canada, Curtis Holden had one nagging worry: "I'm not sure I'll be able to stay up," he said after arriving in Newfoundland on Friday afternoon.

Curtis, 10, won a contest held by Indigo Books & Music to receive the first book in North America.

Even after hours of music and lessons in the care of magical animals, Holden was determined to start in on the 608-page tome before going to bed, but his mother wasn't so sure.

"For a little while, anyway, then I think he's going to crash," said Rana Holden. "I'm definitely going to crash."

Andrea Kavanagh's nine-year-old daughter celebrated her birthday with more than 400 other fans at the Potter party in Newfoundland.

"She's been counting the days," Ms. Kavanagh said. "It was be here, or die."

In Ontario, the historic town of New Hamburg was transformed itself into New Hogsmeade for the weekend, in honour of the fictional town where Harry and his wizard friends relax over a cool glass of butterbeer.

In Yellowknife, the Book Cellar planned to gather Potter fans under the midnight sun to eat Dumbledore dogs on Mucous Mouldy Buns to pass the time until the book went on sale, the sixth instalment in the series that has become a worldwide publishing phenomenon.

In Toronto, there was a party-like atmosphere as excited readers lined up at Mabel's Fables in the west end, counting down the minutes till the doors opened at midnight.

Mallory Baird and Andrea Pinzon, both 19, set up folding chairs at 7 p.m. so they could be first in line, and were among those cheering when the clock hit 12 a.m.

"I've just been a huge fan since I saw the first movie and then I read the four books in four days," said Ms. Baird, who studies literature and history at the University of Toronto.

"During school hours, in class, I had the book in my desk, trying to pay attention to the teacher while I'm reading. I just think they're really great books."

Ms. Pinzon said Ms. Rowling is a great contemporary writer.

"I like the sort of parallel universe that she's created between our world and the magical world. It's comparable in a way. She manages to capture the fact that the world can be beautiful and yet dangerous at the same time for children."

Elsewhere in Toronto, a local bookstore and the Harbourfront Centre hosted DJs, dancing and celebrity readings at a Slytherin House Party, named for one of the four houses at Hogwart's School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

In Montreal, lines of adults and children — many wearing witches hats and robes, snaked through the downtown Indigo bookstore, many craning their necks to see the bookstore's costumed staff hand out the treasured books.

Virginia Patrick, 8, was there with her parents and older sister.

"I like all the magic and stuff," said Virginia as she waited in line. She and her sister Kelsey were both dressed up like wizards.

"I'm happy, excited," said Kelsey, 13. "I really, really want the book so badly. I have the whole collection of Harry Potter books."

Mom Rosa Patrick said the family made the trip to Montreal from their home in nearby St. Bruno, Que., before beginning a vacation on Saturday.

"We're a bit tired but it's exciting. It's the first launch my girls have gone to so we're really happy," said Ms. Patrick, who has read the first four Potter books.

"I can't wait to see what adventures she's made for this young man now. It's quite interesting, the imagination she has. I can't wait to read it."

She said they might buy three copies, giving some as gifts.

Events were planned from Scotland — where 70 lucky fans from around the world got a reading from author J.K. Rowling at Edinburgh Castle — to Mexico City, where a daylong festival overlooked the fact the new book is as yet only available in English.

With just a few hours to go, Curtis Holden's head was swimming with questions about The Half-Blood Prince and Rowling's plans for Harry and his pals.

"You know she's gonna kill somebody again," he said of Ms. Rowling. "Everybody's just dying to find out who she's gonna kill, [and] who's the new characters."

Since the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, hit bookshelves in 1997, more than 270 million Potter books have been printed and sold in 61 languages around the world.

Canadian publisher Raincoast Books is giving the new Potter book the biggest print run in Canadian history, estimated at 1.2 million copies.

Amazon.ca started taking orders for The Half-Blood Prince last December, and the book has topped bestseller lists every week of 2005.

The bookseller has partnered with Canada Post to deliver copies of the book on Saturday to customers who ordered on-line.

Indigo said it expects Potter sales this weekend alone to top the number of current bestseller The Da Vinci Code sold in the last year.

The book is under such wide release that most booksellers are offering 40 per cent discounts to draw customers.

Most stores will barely make enough to cover the cost of the parties.

"Harry Potter for us is not a money maker at all," said Norah Flynn, of Granny Bates Children's Book in St. John's. "It's fun. That's the reason we do it."

New Harry Potter Book Getting Rave Reviews

07-16) 14:41 PDT NEW YORK, (AP) --

After all the hype and midnight madness, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" is proving as much an event to read as to buy.

Critics are calling it the most moving and mature of J.K. Rowling's fantasy series. The New York Times compared it favorably to "The Lord of the Rings," and the Los Angeles Times to "Charlotte's Web." The AP's Deepti Hajela called it a "powerful, unforgettable setup for the finale," Book VII, when the great Potter ride is expected to end.

"It'll be very sad when she finishes writing the books," said Agnes Jang, 16, a resident of Sydney, Australia, who came out Friday night dressed head-to-toe as a student of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

"But Harry has to move on."

With a major character dying, tears may well break out around the globe over the next few days, but the age of Potter VI dawned at midnight Saturday with millions of smiles and a bit of a wink from Rowling. In Edinburgh, Scotland, the author emerged from behind a secret panel inside the city's medieval castle, settled into a leather easy chair and read an excerpt from the sixth chapter to a super-select group of 70 children from around the world.

"You get a lot of answers in this book," Rowling, a resident of Edinburgh, said as she arrived at the castle before thousands of adoring fans. "I can't wait for everyone to read it."

It was party time for Potter lovers. Elisabeth Grant-Gibson, co-owner of "Windows a Bookshop" in Monroe, La., said they did more than double a normal good day's business. The first copy went to 10-year-old Chloe Kaczvinsky, whose parents drove 30 miles to attend the store's Harry Potter Pajama Party.

Her mother read the first chapter aloud during the ride home, and the second at home. Then her parents went to sleep. "I asked Mom if I could read the book in bed. I stayed up to 5 and woke up at 8," Chloe said.

In London, events were muted by the July 7 subway and bus bombings, which killed some 50 people. Book and magazine chain WH Smith scrapped a planned midnight launch at King's Cross Station, from whose fictional Platform 9 3/4 Harry catches the train to Hogwarts at the start of each term. The deadliest of the day's four attacks was on a subway near King's Cross.

Still, hundreds of thousands of fans turned out to purchase Potter.

In Dallas, about 200 of the faithful waited in the dark, mingling in an unlit parking lot, after storms knocked out power at a Barnes & Noble store. White horses posing as unicorns paraded down the main street of Wilmington, Ohio, where Books 'N' More quickly sold hundreds of Potters.

Since Rowling first introduced Harry and his fellow students at Hogwarts to the world in 1997, the books have become a global phenomenon, selling 270 million copies in 62 languages and inspiring a series of movies. Rowling is now the richest woman in Britain, with a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine at $1 billion.

With only brief interruptions, "Half-Blood Prince" has topped the charts of Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com since last December, when Rowling announced that she had completed it. Pre-orders worldwide were in the millions and even the audio book has been keeping pace with such blockbusters as Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" and David McCullough's "1776."

The biggest glitch happened in Canada, where publisher Raincoast sought a court injunction after a Vancouver store accidentally sold 14 copies last week. A judge ordered customers not to discuss the book, copy it, sell it or read it before its release.

The biggest gripes came in the U.S., not from critics, but from booksellers and environmentalists. Independent retailers were upset with Scholastic for selling the book on its web site at a 20 percent discount, more than many stores can afford. Environmentalists, meanwhile, were unhappy that Scholastic, unlike Raincoast, doesn't print the books on 100 percent recycled paper.

"We have some magic up our sleeves too," reads a message posted on the Web site of Greenpeace, "a link to the Canadian publisher of 'Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince,' who can send you a tree-friendly version of this popular book."

___

AP reporters Jill Lawless, Cassandra Vinograd and Sarah Blaskovich in London; Catherine McAloon in Edinburgh, Scotland; and Meraiah Foley in Sydney, Australia contributed to this report.

Net takes Potter fans on magical, frustrating ride

Behold the wizardry of the Web.

The very thing that helped millions of Harry Potter fans around the globe get the latest book delivered to their doorsteps today is also a source of frustration for some who don't want the plot spoiled--the Internet.

In one of the most eagerly anticipated book launches ever, J.K. Rowling's just-released "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" has been breaking online sales records. Some 1.4 million readers preordered the book from Amazon.com alone, where it's been on the best-seller list since it was announced last year.

But as the post office and other delivery services are busy making good on today's guaranteed shipping date, the Internet is already abuzz with reviews of the book, stories from last night's launch parties, speed-readers' plot details and complaints about postings that divulge too much information. Between 11 a.m. and noon PST Saturday, Harry Potter was the No. 1 search term on blog search engine Technorati and "Harry Potter Spoilers" was No. 9

Amazon.com customer Charles Zwilling of New Jersey marveled that there were 37 reviews up on the site early Saturday from people who must have stayed up all night reading.

"Unless you are just one of those people who has to be the first at everything or even worse, someone who likes to ruin things for others, stop writing," he wrote.

Pete Cyclone, of Washington, D.C., asked Amazon readers to boycott the reviews until Monday "in protest of spoilers."

"While free speech is important, Amazon should put a warning on this set of comments so that the rights of others are not trampled upon," he wrote. "At the very least, reviews here should be moderated for the next few days. That way I wouldn't have an inconsolable 14-year-old sister to deal with right now."

Of course, readers could always choose to simply resist going online. But that didn't keep some of the hard core Potter sites, like Mugglenet.com and the Harry Potter Automatic News Aggregator from shutting down their message boards for a couple days before and after the launch, knowing full well that some members wouldn't be able to resist chatting about the plot.

Early online reviews of the book appeared mixed, with Harry likened to everyone from Luke Skywalker from the "Star Wars" films, Henry V and King Arthur, and evil afoot in the plot to recent bomb attacks in London. Some are calling it the darkest Potter book yet, some are calling it the best.

M.G Alcat of Buenos Aires, Argentina was one of countless readers who just couldn't wait until daytime Saturday to curl up with the book. Alcat battled rain and cold weather to get a copy at 12:15 a.m. at a local bookstore, then went home to read, according to an Amazon posting.

"I just finished it, and I can sincerely say that it is simply outstandingly good. Yes, the other books were awesome too, especially the 4th and the 5th, but I think that Harry's world is becoming more defined with each book, and that makes for a thoroughly engaging reading experience," Alcat wrote.

The British Broadcasting Corporation's Web site, www.bbc.co.uk, featured its own Harry Potter "review blog," with a staff member updating readers on his thoughts even before he reached the end of the hardback tome.

"I've just finished the last few words of the book," he wrote at 5.30 a.m. (4:30 GMT), five hours and 30 minutes after the book's official launch.

"In many ways this book has been a mere staging ground for Rowling's final narrative to come," the review continues. "Too much of the book was either a repeat of what we have seen before, or bogged down by Rowling's attempts to maneuver plot lines and characters into position. After a while all magic tricks begin to lose their impact."

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The New York Times ran a lengthy review within hours of the book's release, likening Rowling's achievement to the works of author J.R.R. Tolkien of "Lord of the Rings."

"As the story proceeds...it grows progressively more somber, eventually becoming positively Miltonian in its darkness," the generally favorable write-up said.

Its main criticism was of Rowling's handling of plot developments needed to set up readers for the seventh and final installment.

Meanwhile, a writer for the "We Are Not Sheep" blog and her husband are probably still waiting for the UPS delivery person. She was one of many bloggers who, unable to write about the book, talked about the book's anticipated arrival.

"Starting at 7:30 this morning, (my husband has) been looking out the front door every five minutes (or less)...He's also looking at the tracking system every few minutes as well," she wrote. "I was going to title this post 'I married an 11-year old,' but I don't think I want the kind of Google-juice that would provide."

Reuters contributed to this report.

BOOK REVIEW
'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince'

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince By J.K. Rowling Scholastic; 652 pages; $29.99 A major character dies by the end of the latest Harry Potter book; readers who bore easily may feel a bit done in themselves. It's not that "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" is dull, exactly. In places, it rises to a pitch resembling suspense, or at least a passing curiosity about what might happen next. No, the main problem is that J.K. Rowling has now written six of these bricks. Even if they were getting better, they're certainly not getting any fresher. To enlighten folks who haven't already been reading themselves cross-eyed since midnight Friday, the new book typically finds Harry afflicted with crises both magical and mundane. On the one hand, intimations abound of impending Armageddon -- as you might expect for a series supposedly one book shy of the ultimate confrontation between good and evil. But Rowling also finds time for all her customary wizard-school shenanigans, and Harry puts in long hours mediating between Ron and Hermione, his hopelessly lovesick friends. The book begins at the notably unmagical address of 10 Downing St., where a nameless British prime minister is coping with a mysterious onslaught of bad news. Trouble has spilled over from Harry's world into ours. Matters deteriorate so far that, by book's end, a prolonged battle will leave the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry half in ruins. Like all the best writers for young people, Rowling knows that kids can take a lot more reality than they usually get credit for. Without it, in fact, they start to suspect they're being patronized, or conned. Close readers and other killjoys will see all this darkness as a sign of our paranoid times, and it would be a hard point to argue. Students pass through sensors on their way into and out of Hogwarts. A security curfew appears in effect for much of the book, and reference is made to some kind of invasive search that Rowling rather cleverly calls a "Probity Probe." There's even a minor character named Shunpike, never seen but only talked about, who functions solely as a martyr to Guantanamo-style preventive detention. (Clearly, Rowling's unobtrusive liberalism doesn't stop with Hogwarts' exemplary racial pluralism.) Alongside all these doomy portents, of course, we also get the usual complement of wizarding lessons and Quidditch matches. Harry has a new teacher in his Potions class, Horace Slughorn -- an annoying and altogether credible social climber who sucks up to his own students, provided they come from influential enough families. Helping Harry in Slughorn's class is an old textbook annotated by someone calling himself the "half-blood prince," though he winds up more of a quarter-blood instead. All this Buffy-style combining of kid's stuff and saving the world is, of course, part of Harry Potter's tremendous appeal. It usually builds to some apocalyptic showdown that leaves our heroes wounded but determined, and the forces of darkness routed but regrouping -- and everything else pretty much back where it started. Until now. As everybody and his Aunt Lillian must already know, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" is the penultimate book in the series. To tide us over, this one often plays like a mere overture to the finale to come -- a finale that, if Rowling has been working toward it all these years, might ideally feel less like an undercard , and more like the main event. If only Rowling didn't so often fall back on repetitive magical shootouts. A sentence like "He put his head down and sprinted forward, narrowly avoiding a blast that erupted over his head" is flat and familiar, regardless of whether that blast comes from a magic wand or an M-16. And now, a word about love. Much has been made of Rowling's attempts over the last couple of books to tell the hormonal truth about what it's really like for a group of friends to go from 11 years old, in the first book, to roughly 16. To her credit, at least within the constraints of a book suitable for children, she hasn't ignored the plangent crushes and unbearable jealousies that not only teenagers are heir to. Maddeningly, though, the novel ends with Harry telling his new ladylove, "I can't be involved with you anymore. We've got to stop seeing each other. We can't be together ... I've got things to do alone now." This might have passed without comment if monkishness hadn't become almost a prerequisite for saving the world lately. Not just Harry but recent film incarnations of Batman and Superman have all included scenes where the hero piously accepts that fighting evil and having a girlfriend just don't mix. But why? Why, in a culture otherwise fascinated with the sex lives of total strangers -- at least so long as they're halfway famous -- have we become so puritanical about characters we actually like?

In the new book's best scene, Harry's mentor Dumbledore solemnly tells him that, "You are protected by your ability to love." In other words, the only thing that distinguishes Harry from his evil adversary is the simple capacity for human tenderness. And yet for Harry, as for the new breed of movie loner-superhero, to express love is finally seen as a distraction or, worse, a weakness. When the seventh and final Potter novel finally arrives, would it be too much to hope that the hero prevails, not because he can manfully sacrifice his capacity for love, but because he can't?