I will stick my hand up and admit it - I got the latest Harry Potter book on Saturday morning, started reading it in the evening, and managed to finish it by the end of the day... while it certainly wasn't as hard to read as, say, anything released by Tom Clancy in the past 5 years, it wasn't exactly the most entertaining 5 hours of my life.
I quite enjoyed the others - they steadily improved throughout the series, though I kept wondering if Potter himself would ever actually start to think for himself and grow up. Sadly, even though the character is now supposed to be 16, he's as immature as ever, sneaking around, hiding under his cloak with his map, and generally beign a pain in the neck. Almost every single sentence in the conversations between him and Dumbledore starts with "But...", and he seems incapable of independant thought, idea or opinion.
I'm going to do my best not to spoil the plot for anyone here, but suffice it to say that I knew pretty much what would happen in the end from very early on, with JK opting for the bloody obvious, where it would have been nice to have thrown in a twist, and given us something really unexpected, so the rest of the book was really quite an anti-climax with convenient plot devices.
Ron still just grates, and Hermione (surely the true heroine of the books) rarely gets a chance to do anything interesting. The attempts at teenage angst and hormones seem a bit forced, but at least this gives us some impression of aging - even if the characters still act like pre-teens. I mean, how many 16 year olds still stick their hands up with gusto when asked a question by a teacher? Where's the sullen behaviour, the teen magazines, the bitching?
Ah well - only one more to go.