The book: It was disappointing. It needed a good editor. JKR did too much telling, not enough showing. It could have done with 100 less pages. Parts of it were really confusing because of the amount of back story and explanation she tried to input in it.

And the epilogue just was rather disappointing from a feminist viewpoint, hoping for some redemption for the kind of poor treatment of female characters who played second fiddle to male characters or who were otherwise attracted to male characters who were written as inferior to them. :/

I wasn't a huge fan coming in. I am certainly not a huge fan now. If I spend too much time thinking about it, I will hate it.

In the case of Hermione, she marries a male who is frequently depicted as intellectually inferior, kind of unattractive and more socially inept than she was. That's still a step down to a certain degree for her. If she had say married Krum, it would have been much more a step up.

And we don't know what Hermione and Ginny did. No one seemed to recognize them 19 years later. That seems to imply they hold no current status of importance, no power position where parents would talk about them. Ron and Harry, yeah, they get talked about. Not the women.

This whole thing kind of just annoys me and I don't know how to express my feelings in a way that isn't wanky. I really loathe that in the end, all that discussion about what they would do after Hogwarts was for nothing. Harry, Ginny, Ron, Hermione raise beautiful babies who fall into the same stereotypes as their parents and persist in the same patterns which had already been shown as not necessarily healthy. And just GAH!

I liked it mostly, except for one huge fault: why didn't they call for Kreacher when they inadvertently led the death eaters to Harry's house? I mean, he could have gotten them food while they were camping out, cooked it a lot better than Harry or Hermione and done some major scouting. Not to mention keeping them in touch with the order of the phoenix.

But even smart Hermione never even thought about it. And this really, really bugged me enough to distract me for several pages.

I must've blinked again, then. I reread that part this evening and other than the gang missing Kreacher's cooking, I could find no mention of him.

On page 229 in my copy.

You're absolutely right, found it right there.

I think my main reason for being ticked off was that I was worried about Kreacher, too, and because I missed this, I thought Harry hadn't given it a second thought. Glad to know I was wrong. And they were wrong, too, Kreacher apparently left the house safely, or he wouldn't have been able to lead the Hogwarts' house-elves charge at the end.