After 10 years, Harry Potter fans cracked the spine of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows last week and finally found out how the saga of history's best selling book series wrapped up.
J.K. Rowling's final tale of witchcraft and wizardry did not disappoint as plot threads dangling ever since Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone were resolved.
The final installment begins with a glimpse into the dark world of Potter's constant arch villain Lord Voldemort, setting the mood for what's by far the darkest tale in the series.
Whereas Rowling let readers glimpse parts of the wizarding world's underbelly in the Order of the Phoenix and the torturous actions of Dolores Umbridge - who reappears in an essential role in this newest novel - the true extent of You-Know-Who's evil is on full display here.
The body count begins to mount the moment Harry leaves his home and begins his quest to find four Horcruxes, a task left to him by his mentor Dumbledore.
By the time all is said and done, 11 characters central to the storyline, including four established when the saga began, lie dead.Rowling has long proven that she is a master of character development and she continues to use that skill here, fleshing out Harry, Ron, and Hermione even more fully.
But she also lends this craft to some of her lesser characters most notably with Harry's fellow Gryffindor Neville Longbottom and the miserable house elf of Harry's, Kreacher.
New aspects of both these characters are brought to light, with Neville emerging as one of the series' greatest protagonists by book's end.
The one fault of this final installment may be that Rowling has left her fans caring too much for these characters.
When in the final chapter, an epilogue taking the reader 19 years into the future explores the destiny of some of the book's central characters (and introduces six new ones, possibly for another series of books?).
This leaves one to wonder what happened to the other characters she neglected to mention?
The Harry Potter series was about far more than just Harry Potter and his immediate circle of friends, and it would have been nice to glimpse what became of the other characters that avid fans have been following for the last 10 years.
That being said, as a whole the Deathly Hallows wraps up the saga elegantly and offers the same escapist thrill ride one has come to expect from Rowling.
As she herself wrote at the end of the book, "all is well."
