Harry Potter Works His Magic Again in a Far Darker Tale - New York Times

Harry Potter Works His Magic Again in a Far Darker Tale - New York Times: "n an earlier Harry Potter novel, Sibyll Trelawney, divination teacher, looks at Harry and declares that her inner eye sees past his 'brave face to the troubled soul within.'
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Featured Author: J. K. Rowling
Collected coverage of Harry Potter: book and movie reviews, an interview with the author and more.

HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE
By J. K. Rowling.
Illustrations by Mary GrandPré.
632 pages. Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic. $29.99.

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'I regret to say that your worries are not baseless,' she adds. 'I see difficult times ahead for you, alas ... most difficult ... I fear the thing you dread will indeed come to pass ... and perhaps sooner than you think.'

In 'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,' that frightening prophecy does in fact come true - in a thoroughly harrowing denouement that sees the death of yet another important person in Harry's life, and that renders this, the sixth volume of the series, the darkest and most unsettling installment yet.

It is a novel that pulls together dozens of plot strands from previous volumes, underscoring how cleverly and carefully J. K. Rowling has assembled this giant jigsaw puzzle of an epic. It is also a novel that depicts Harry Potter, now 16, as more alone than ever - all too well aware of loss and death, and increasingly isolated by his growing reputation as 'the Chosen One,' picked from among all others to do battle with the Dark Lord, Voldemort.

As the novel opens, the wizarding world is at war: Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters have grown so powerful that their evil deeds have spilled over into the Muggle world of nonmagic folks. The Muggles' prime minister has been alerted by the Ministry of Magic about the rise of Voldemort. And the terrible thin"