Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. London: Bloomsberry, 2005.

Like all Harry Potter series, this book is also about the archetypal battle between the good and the evil. Rowling uses stereotypes quite effectively, sometimes to quite politically incorrect proportions, but the book inspite of it is also quite seductive.

The insight built in the previous book, that Voldermort and Harry cannot exist together - to be read as good and evil cannot survive together - seems to be built in this book also. But, I liked the building of the more complex stuff about good and evil - that Harry could actually read Voldermot's thoughts and there was Harry in Voldermot and the other way round.

The cental image in this book is the "Advanced Potion Making" text that Harry comes to possess by chance. This makes him an expert in a subject he was just average. The book belongs to an older student who signed as "The half blood prince." At some stage, Harry finds out that the half blood prince is also quite a dangerous person. Most of Hogwarts keeps going on in Dumbledore and Harry's private lessons where Dumbledore tries to get into the mind of Voldermort by reliving memories of Tom Riddle, his origins, his childhood and later his turning into Lord Voldermort. The findings lead to the conclusion that Voldermort was ashamed of his muggle origins and all his efforts at keeping the purity of the magical race is because he cannot face his own origins. Harry shares most of Voldermort's upbringing but has turned out t be the opposite.

This is geering towards an adult fiction with the problems of love and Dumbledore's death happening which will take Harry towards adulthood without parents finally.