Boy, Michiko Kakutani must have read HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS super duper fast (or ordered it off DeepDiscount.com?) in order to get the review filed and on the New York Times’ website by 7 PM last night. Some pullquotes: Rowling has an “astonishingly limber” voice; the book “is, for the most part, a somber book that marks Harry’s final initiation into the complexities and sadnesses of adulthood”; and without revealing much in the way of spoilers, Kakutani ends as follows:

The world of Harry Potter is a place where the mundane and the marvelous, the ordinary and the surreal co-exist. It’s a place where cars can fly and owls can deliver the mail, a place where paintings talk and a mirror reflects people’s innermost desires. It’s also a place utterly recognizable to readers, a place where death and the catastrophes of daily life are inevitable, and people’s lives are defined by love and loss and hope – the same way they are in our own mortal world.

O box, thy name is Pandora.