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Hello, and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club for Friday, July 15th.

My name is Hannah Rosen, and I'm double X editor at Slate. Audio Book Club for Friday, July 15th. My name is Hannah Rosen and I'm

double X editor at Slate. I'm here in the Washington, D.C. studio with Noah, who is my daughter

and an esteemed Harry Potter expert. Hello, Noah. Hi. And we are joined in the Massachusetts

sleepaway camp office, apparently the infirmary, which is the subsidiary of Slate in Massachusetts by Emily Bazelon. Hi, Emily.

Hey.

And her lovely son, Simon, eight-year-old Simon. Hi, Simon.

Hi.

The reason we have brought these experts here is, of course, because we are talking about Harry Potter 7. In fact, we are posting this book club earlier than usual because we are so excited about the Harry Potter

movie, which for sure you have either seen a preview for unless you're living in a deep dark cave

or been taken to Ascabon. You must have seen the preview or some of the posters for Harry Potter

7. Now, we are going to assume that most of the

listeners on this podcast are all fans. And so we're not going to do an extensive summary of the

plot, which anyway would take us about three and a half hours for sure take up the whole podcast.

So we're going to look at some of the big questions and also how they look on film. And the

reason we invited Simon and Noah with us, which is a first ever on the Slate Audio Book Club, is because they, frankly, know more than we do about these books. Hey, speak for yourself. Maybe Emily is a Harry Potter obsessive. But anyway, I really needed Noah to explain to me many, many things about Dumbledore's final speech to Harry Potter in the King's Cross chapter,

but we'll get to that. That's the very end of the book. So all you need to know is that this book is about the final showdown, obviously, between Harry and the Dark Lord. That's the big main plot. It is much, much darker, darker than the other books. You know, it has sort of Ascabonis, the Goulog and these Nuremberg laws, which are the blood laws. And it's very different in feel than the other books. So I'm going to throw my first question to Noah, which is this is the first book in which the kids are really out there alone. They're not at Hogwarts. They don't have teachers around. There's no Dumbledore to guide them. Did you think that worked well? Were you frightened by that?

What did you think about that as a setting for 700 pages of aloneness?

I think that was a good idea because it's sort of, it's a change from the other books, but it's a change that really makes you think about the characters.

I think the only problem was it was a little bit sudden. They

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