A handful of characters die and many others are tortured in a bone-chilling ride before the Harry Potter series comes to its eagerly awaited end with “good old-fashioned closure”.

Or, at least, that’s what the first reviews from America say.

They may have come a few days earlier than J. K. Rowling expected, but the author has been lauded for providing readers with a fantasy worthy of comparison with The Lord of the Rings,The Wizard of Ozand the novels of Charles Dickens.

Two American newspapers broke the strict embargo surrounding Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by publishing reviews yesterday, crediting Rowling with rounding off her seven-volume saga with a satisfying conclusion worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster.

While The New York Times avoided giving away the ending, readers looking for clues were given plenty of hints, including the revelation that at least half a dozen characters meet their untimely end.

The reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, wrote: “And true to its roots, it ends . . . with good old-fashioned closure: a big-screen, heart-racing, bone-chilling confrontation and an epilogue that clearly lays out people’s fates. Ms Rowling has fitted together the jigsaw pieces of this long undertaking with Dickensian ingenuity and ardour.”

At the Baltimore Sun, the other newspaper to print a review, the book is described as a “coming-of-age tale” that “inevitably loses some of its vitality and spark” as it is primarily about coming to terms with death.

Mary Carole McCauley writes: “Suffice it to say, though, that once you have consumed the final sentence on the final page crafted by Rowling, the ending seems inevitable. It is a tribute to the author’s consummate story-telling skills that once the pieces fall into place it all seems rather obvious. No other outcome would have been so plausible.

“Book seven is about coming to terms with death. From Plato to Descartes, our greatest thinkers have struggled with mortality and in crafting her own answer, Rowling heavily borrows from a Christian notion of resurrection and the wisdom of accepting our own inevitable disintegration and decay.”

Kakutani points to occasional “lumpy passages of exposition and a couple of chunky detours” but praises Rowling for an overall conclusion that possesses a “convincing inevitability”. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is, he writes, less playful than its predecessors, and Harry finally leaves his childhood behind. “High-spirited games of Quidditch have given way to real war and Harry often wishes he were not the de facto leader of the Resistance movement, shouldering terrifying responsibilities, but an ordinary teenage boy.”

Both reviews note that objects and spells from previous books become important in the unravelling of the plot, but the Sun suggests that some ardent fans will be disappointed that not all their questions are answered.

Kakutani concludes: “The world of Harry Potter is a place where the mundane and the marvellous, the ordinary and the surreal, coexist. It’s a place where cars can fly and owls can deliver the mail, a place where paintings talk and the mirror reflects people’s innermost desires. It’s also a place utterly recognisable 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.”

Both newspapers said that they did not obtain the book from the internet, where every page was apparently leaked three days ahead of the official publication date.

Rowling said in a statement that she was upset by the reviews in the American press. “I am staggered that some American newspapers have decided to publish purported spoilers in the form of reviews in complete disregard of the wishes of literally millions of readers, particularly children, who wanted to reach Harry’s final destination by themselves, in their own time.”

In a separate message on her website she asked fans to ignore the leaked stories surrounding the book. “I’d like to ask everyone who calls themselves a Potter fan to help preserve the secrecy for all those who are looking forward to reading the book at the same time on publication day.”

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