Brilliant novel. What has impressed me most about The Half Blood Prince, is JK Rowling's unwillingness to baby her readers like so many of the great children's authors, from CS Lewis to JRR Tolkien, have done. Those past authors simply couldn't bear to confront the issue of death with the honesty Rowling has. In those other works, strong, good characters could only die of natural causes, while gruesome, premature deaths were reserved for characters like Tolkien's Boromir, who had been led astray by evil. This babying approach tends to promote the fairytailish notion that death is somehow just. Rowling's deaths, on the other hand, promote an sense of the profound unfairness of life that really rings true in a world where geopolitics have become so dominated by terrorist threats. I see Dumbledore's naive trust as a metaphor for the trust that has allowed open-societies to flourish, but is now, sadly, coming apart at the seams.
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