There's a certain addictiveness with the Harry Potter books that's hard to deny. It's a sensible move that the novels mature with their audience, so by the time we get to this, the fifth book in the series, it's more in-depth, more teen-angsty than the previous outings with a nice line in dark and twisted moments.

However, in other ways it's a disappointment. The book's hard to put down and doesn't feel its length, but it's hard to deny there's an awful lot of prose that doesn't really add a lot to the plot. There's not as much pure filler as the last novel, with Hermione's house elf obsession thankfully shuffled to one side this time around, but there's undoubtedly a lot of time devoted to certain plotlines that, in the end, don't really tie into the novel's climax. Again. And what's all that repetition needed for? How many time does Harry have to lose his temper and yell at his friends? How many times does his stomach have to jump to show that he's somewhat in love with Cho? And how many punishments and disappointments does he have to suffer to show that his fifth year at Hogwarts is not an easy one? How many scrapes do Fred and George have to get into?

And all the extra wordage doesn't always help the characterisations. Take for example, Delores Umbridge. In the movie version I found her to be a wonderful, rather satirical villain. In the novel less so, since she's so obviously described as repulsive a toad-like and pantomime-villainous from the first rather than the semi-subtlety of Imelda Staunton's performance. Given her presence throughout the novel, I was expecting some kind of tie-in to the climax - instead she's a hindrance throughout and then is not-so-neatly shuffled aside to make room for the real villain to appear.

Then there's the disappointing way some of the old characters are used. While Snape and Neville finally get further developed and Hermione gets to demonstrate she's wise as well as smart, Ron is given nothing of interest to do and doesn't contribute to the plot at all, while Hagrid and Dumbledore are screwed over rather, with the former's repeated oblivious tendency to put his friends in mortal peril and the latter's unsympathetic and illogical reasons for being a jerk to Harry for most of the novel. And Sirius is pretty much only tolerable because of remembrance of Gary Oldman's charismatic performances in the movies rather than the portrayal in the novel.

Of course, Harry's whiny bad temper would be off-putting by itself, but since I've never found him particularly sympathetic anyway, I can't say it bothered me too much. In one way I rather liked that the heroes demonstrated more shades of grey and Harry wasn't portrayed as being the perfect, lucky bastard of previous novels and he and his friends aren't saved by some magical doohicky at the end of the book and there are losses. It's especially nice to see his "heroic" father and god-father had plenty of darkness in their souls and Rowling isn't afraid to show Harry himself as a typical teenager - making him aggressive, loud, irritating and out and out obnoxious at times. Whether there's much fun in that depends on your mileage, though.

So some good, mixed with the bad. The trouble is, while the earlier novels were light on detail, I found this one went the opposite way. I didn't care about the ins and outs of the quiddich teams or a daily breakdown of the character's revision timetables. And 25 pages of exposition at the end of the novel is rather too many, let's face it.

In fairness, however, despite its length and the amount of unnecessary storylines tagged onto the central plot, I didn't feel like putting the book down at any point. In fact, I found it rather addictive and read it a lot quicker and easier than I was expecting why I first picked it up. However, I couldn't help but feel that the tempo should have picked up rather more than it did - the return of Voldemort apparently meant nothing more than a few bad dreams for Harry and him attempting to hear a prophesy. Hardly the terrifying weapon we'd been hearing about and the confrontation with Voldemort isn't exactly gripping. For book five I was expecting a more climactic plot than I got.

From what I hear, and from the movie adaptation, I can look forward to more teenage soap opera in the next book and very little plot, but if the book's as easy to read as this was, despite its numerous flaws, I won't mind that much.