"This book really distils everything that makes the series not just great, but BELOVED by so many! I love the way JKR reunited Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs, how they were all present that night at the end. It is, I think, one of the best plot climaxes ever. The sense of fate and magic and just everything falling into place in a remarkable CONFLUENCE of events -- the sense that things could not and should not happen any other way. Everything
fit. Of course the Marauders should all have been present, back at Hogwarts in their own way: Sirius, still mad with guilt and grief and anger, in search of revenge; Peter, cowering, timid rat lying low, trying to remain inconspicuous; Lupin, reasonable, professorly, conflicted between keeping and exposing the secrets he shared with his best friends at Hogwarts that made his years there bearable; and Prongs, the brave guardian keeping his son safe. And yet, somehow JKR still manages to make this confluence a result of not just fate; she manages to emphasise, again, how choices, decisions, matter, how our own actions and their consequences are "always so complicated, so diverse", how the future is never set in stone because of that. Just AMAZING writing.
Most of all, though, I love how friendship is the biggest theme of this book. I LOVE THE MARAUDERS. I love that they became animagi for Lupin, I love that all of them had monthly adventures in and around Hogwarts, I love their map. I've read the part where Lupin recounts their friendship to Harry, Ron and Hermione countless times. So it's even sadder to realise that the Marauders were just torn apart by -- Voldemort's rise to power, basically. Sirius suspecting Lupin... Wormtail betraying them... James dying. And Sirius, Lupin and Peter, though they survive, are each destroyed by that: Sirius carted off to Azkaban, Lupin alone, facing the prejudices others have against him without his best friends, and even Peter, living as a rat for 12 years, which is more than he deserves but still -- living as a rat for 12 years. But in this book some old wounds begin to heal, at least, and Sirius and Lupin can be brothers again. LOVE THEM. LOVE THIS BOOK."
- Eunice, on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
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