Harry Potter’s sixth-year at Hogwarts makes for an epic adventure tale. Harry and his classmates are more in control of their futures than ever, able to select the courses in which they want to specialize and prepare for the N.E.W.T. exams which will determine their prospects. When they aren’t hitting the books, their main preoccupation seems to be finding a classmate to canoodle with. The love lives of Harry and his friends have never been so front-and-center before, as Ron and Hermione each seek to deny their obvious attraction to each other by hooking up with other people and Harry tries to deny his powerful crush on Ginny Weasley, his Quidditch teammate and, more worryingly, his best friend’s sister.
Harry is also distracted by his obsession with his archrival Draco Malfoy. After overhearing some conversations while utilizing his invisibility cloak, Harry is convinced that Draco has taken his father’s place among the Death Eaters and is working on behalf of Lord Voldemort. He finds some surprising resistance to this idea from both Ron and Hermione. Indeed, between this and all the relationship drama, there is a tedious amount of infighting amidst the trio of best friends.
Harry has also started taking private lessons directly from the headmaster of Hogwarts, Albus Dumbledore. While honored to be singled out by a great wizard whom he thoroughly admires, Harry is nevertheless occasionally frustrated by Dumbledore’s partial confidence. There are things Harry feels like he needs to know that Dumbledore still withholds from him. First and foremost among them is the reason that Dumbledore so thoroughly trusts Professor Snape, despite his status as a former Death Eater. Potter and Snape still continuously butt heads, and Harry can not understand how Dumbledore can continue to depend on him at every turn.
One thing working in Harry’s favor, intriguingly, is the mystery of the novel’s secondary title character. When Harry is forced to borrow a textbook for his Potions class with the new staff addition, Professor Slughorn, he finds that the text is annotated with extremely helpful suggestions made by a former Hogwarts student who refers to himself only as the Half-Blood Prince. While Hermione is suspicious (and perhaps jealous of Harry’s new status as the best student in class) Harry is delighted to finally be excelling in a subject that had been ruined for him by Professor Snape’s disdain.
There is so much going on in this sixth novel in the series, but Rowling’s command of the material is very impressive. She balances out the need to address the entirety of her huge cast of characters while maintaining a primary focus on the characters the audience most wants to spend time with. She develops the continuing story of the series while seamlessly adding in new elements and steering the whole thing toward its inevitable final confrontation.
But first, she ends Half-Blood Prince on the largest emotional wallop of the entire series. A moment so huge that its impact was not dulled at all by the fact that I was spoiled on it some twenty years ago. (I may not have read the series when everyone else did, but neither did I live under a rock at the time.) It’s a stunning moment, and speaks to how well the world of Hogwarts has been defined throughout the series. I am eagerly looking forward to reaching the conclusion in book seven, The Deathly Hallows.