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and another on Bellatrix’s shoulder in chapter two. By the time we got to Harry in chapter three, we were ready to resume our comfortable position on our friend’s shoulder—a perspective from someone we like.
    But for you hard-core readers determined not to identify with Harry, Ms. Rowling had another hook to suck you into delusion with the rest of us. For twenty-eight of the thirty chapters, everyone thought Harry a nutcase for believing Draco was the Death Eater and that Snape was helping him with his mission from the Dark Lord. If we were resistant to believing Harry to be right in these beliefs, we were in good company: Ron, Hermione, Remus Lupin, Nymphadora Tonks, Mr. and Mrs. Weasley, even Albus Dumbledore also thought Harry just as determined to believe the worst of Malfoy and Snape.
    But then, of course, events confirm everything Harry thought since the book’s beginning! Malfoy was on a suicide mission from the Dark Lord! Snape was his willing comrade and a man capable of killing the beloved headmaster who appears more than a little Christlike! And everyone in a wave in the infirmary conclave around Bill’s broken body ends up apologizing to Harry for doubting him and for believing the best of others like Dumbledore when they should have been hating Snape and Malfoy. Harry is a prophet!
    You’re a better reader than I am if the traction of this current didn’t pull you off your feet and send you downstream. This isn’t just “narrative misdirection.” This is literary judo, and Ms. Rowling has a black belt, third dan, in this martial art, I think.

The Judo Throw at the Finish of Half-Blood Prince
    If you don’t know anything about judo or its cousin aikido, let me explain what I mean. The point of these martial arts is to use the force or direction of the opponent to subdue him or her. If someone tries to punch or kick you, the judo response is to “encourage” him to continue in his unbalanced direction and lock him up. Ms. Rowling’s judo move is to get us leaning exactly the way we want and then push us over in that direction.
    We began the sixth story as careful readers who had been duped by and large five times. We’d all taken oaths, publicly and privately, not to be fooled a sixth time. Everyone else in the book was on our side. “Sure, Harry,” pat on head, shared glance with Dumbledore and Hermione, “we know. Draco’s the youngest Death Eater ever and you know best about Snape—like all the other times you’ve been right about Snape. Which would be ‘never, ever, right about Snape.’” As much as we love Harry, we were not going to kick ourselves again at book’s end for buying into Harry’s jaundiced view. We leaned way back from Harry.
    But he was right! And everybody that was with us in leaning away from Harry was on the floor apologizing for not trusting in his discernment. This is the crucial difference between the ending of Half-Blood Prince and every previous Harry Potter book. In every other book’s finale we swore we wouldn’t identify with Harry’s view again. We took solemn oaths that next time we’d be more like Hermione and we’d see this as one of Harry’s mistakes, his “saving people thing.”
    At the end of Half-Blood Prince , though, we weren’t saying, “I was suckered again! Doggone it!” We were saying, “Wow. Harry was right. Snape killed Dumbledore as part of the plan that the Dark Lord had for Malfoy to do in the headmaster. Time to line up behind Harry and go Horcrux and Snape hunting on our white hippogriff and in our white cowboy hats.”
    Ms. Rowling spun us around again. The funny thing, of course, is that after bruising our foreheads five times previously, we should have expected that the big twist would be coming in the seventh and last book. Dumbledore died, alas, and wasn’t available at the end of Prince to explain how stupid we were to believe Harry again.
    To get to the stunning “twist” at the end of Deathly Hallows , though, we