Hoot, hoot! All aboard for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling!
I might be a little sleep-deprived…
But I must say I enjoyed rereading the Harry Potter books as an adult. Like most readers my age, these books were a huge part of my childhood and all the way through my later life (every twenty-something knows what Hogwarts house they belong in), but there are so many small details you only truly appreciate upon rereading them after almost a decade of obsessing over the story and the world.
Yet, somehow, I haven’t completely learned my lesson. Even with everything I know about him, I still got all emotional during the scene with Dumbledore’s funeral and had to repeat “He’s an asshole, he’s an asshole, he’s an asshole” in my head, so I wouldn’t start getting teary-eyed…
At least he’s being all flashy and badass on the cover. My Danish edition shows the same scene, just 5 minutes earlier, where the Inferi is crawling toward Harry kneeling by the water, and that cover art almost struck me as rather nightmare-inducing. Yet I still had a poster with it on the wall of my bedroom for years, so it was the last thing I saw every night before I closed my eyes.
No wonder I have suffered from insomnia ever since my early teens.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
by J. K. Rowling
The war against Voldemort is not going well; even the Muggles have been affected. Dumbledore is absent from Hogwarts for long stretches of time, and the Order of the Phoenix has already suffered losses.
And yet . . . as with all wars, life goes on. Sixth-year students learn to Apparate. Teenagers flirt and fight and fall in love. Harry receives some extraordinary help in Potions from the mysterious Half-Blood Prince. And with Dumbledore’s guidance, he seeks out the full, complex story of the boy who became Lord Voldemort — and thus finds what may be his only vulnerability.
