"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows"
By J.K. Rowling
Scholastic Inc., $34.99

Was the publication of a book ever so hotly anticipated -- or the finishing of it ultimately so dreaded?

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With the release at midnight Friday of 12 million copies of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," Potterites the world over spent their weekend saying goodbye to Harry, Ron, Hermione and their world. It was quite a ride -- J.K. Rowling proving that, as she promised, she knew what she was doing.

If Harry Potter has had it hard all these years -- fighting basilisks, Death Eaters, and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named -- imagine the task faced by Rowling, bringing to conclusion the story of Harry Potter: boy wizard, librarians' darling, media superstar.

In this book, the seventh and last, she needed to finish the sprawling tale in a way that was true to both the magic and the human realism on which she built it, resolving plotlines while she developed character in a way that satisfies a decade's worth of readers, a great bulk of whom have grown up on these books. In "The Deathly Hallows," the deepest, most satisfying book of them all, Rowling was more than up to her task, making this book as big and complex and magical is it needed to be.

Readers familiar with the series will find return appearances by such favorites as the Whomping Willow, Rita Skeeter and Sirius Black's flying motorbike. House elves, goblins and centaurs all get in on the action. There's a wedding and a birth. And the Weasley twins are as reliably wry as ever. There are moments of surprising, genuine love. But overall, "The Deathly Hallows" is serious business, a fitting end to a series that has grown darker with each book.

At the beginning we find Harry, as always, home with the Dursleys and chafing to be gone. School at Hogwarts is due to begin, but Harry has a more important task, the one assigned to him by Dumbledore at the end of the sixth book, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince." Aided by his friends Ron and Hermione, he must find and destroy six Horcruxes, magical objects in which the dark wizard Voldemort has concealed split-off parts of his soul in order to assure immortality.

And so they head off on their own, in secret, out into the wider world, where Voldemort's followers, called Death Eaters, have infiltrated the Ministry of Magic and are now rounding up and persecuting Muggles (nonmagical folk) and "half-bloods."

Rowling sends the seekers on a meandering journey that has them ordering cappuccinos in a late-night cafe in London, sneaking into the Ministry of Magic, breaking into Gringott's bank, barely eluding capture. In the previous books, these would have been high-adventure hijinks, sure of final success.

But much of "Deathly Hollows" finds Harry and his friends hiding out in the woods, confused, bickering and hungry. Dumbledore, who always had the answers, is gone, and Voldemort is back inside Harry's head, more powerful than ever. The scenario is often bleak, and Rowling proves the stakes are real, killing off one of the main characters within the first hundred pages.

And it turns out there are more than just Horcruxes for Harry and his friends to discover and understand. First are the items Dumbledore has left them in his will: a Quidditch snitch for Harry, a book for Hermione, and for Ron, the Deluminator Dumbledore used to darken the streetlights in the very first book. What are they supposed to do with these things? And then there are the Deathly Hallows, enchanted objects of wizard lore, which may or may not even exist.

What it all means, they have no idea. This quest is not easy or obvious, and Harry is tried by disillusionment as much as he is by Dark Magic. Along the way he learns more than he wants to about Dumbledore's complex past, as well as that of his nemesis, Professor Snape. The psychological growth and maturity required of him are as difficult as the magical feats he must accomplish in order to destroy the Dark Lord.

Much has been made of Rowling's hint that major characters will die, and fans have spent the past two years debating whether or not Snape is a traitor. And the biggest question of all has been the fate of Harry -- how could he die? How could he live? But the answers to these questions come nowhere near conveying the truths Rowling reveals in this last volume.

Yes, important characters die. There is both betrayal and salvation. There is a climactic war between the forces of Voldemort and the Order of the Phoenix on the grounds of Hogwarts castle, and it is a fight to the finish. But the whole plot is so much more complicated, and so much more meaningful, than the final body count. The simple questions of who dies, who is good, who is bad are rendered almost irrelevant. In this last chapter of Harry's journey, he learns that the tidy divisions between pure and impure, good and bad, even life and death, are more complex than any of us could have guessed. This Harry Potter book is a symphony, not a simple melody, and to get the genuine meaning, you'll have to read it.

What's been fascinating about J. K Rowling's world is how close it lies to ours. Unlike the separate lands of Tolkien's Middle Earth or C.S. Lewis's Narnia, Rowling's world in the Harry Potter books is a precariously balanced interface between the magical realm and the Muggle world we recognize. To get to Hogwarts School, Harry and his friends travel by a magical train, but it leaves from the emblematic platform 9³/₄, snuggled magically in between our trains.

The wizarding world lies alongside, sometimes just inside, the world we recognize, navigated by Harry, a boy who belongs to both and serves as our guide. The attraction of these books has been that the issues in them are as familiar as they are strange, and thus what Harry learns is useful to the kids who read them.

As for whether or not the Harry Potter books will go down in history as a great children's literature, there are ultimately two tests: First, does it inspire a deeper understanding of the complexities of the world and of the journey through life? And, just as important: is the story a rollicking good adventure? "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" brilliantly meets both objectives. In bringing her saga of Harry to a close, Rowling casts her last, final spell, and she gets it just right.