Looking ahead: Discussion group gathers Harry Potter fans

The speculation already is running at a fever pitch.

Which beloved character dies?

Is Snape a Death Eater after all?

Will Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry ever find someone to teach the ill-fated Defense Against the Dark Arts class?

And most of all: Will Harry Potter survive his inevitable confrontation with the evil Lord Voldemort?

These questions and others are the hot topic Saturdays at noon at Barnes & Noble in Spokane Valley.

“We have a Harry Potter Discussion Group that has been meeting here,” manager Ameera Hazelton said. “They’ve been reading one book a week and discussing it. This week they’re up to the third book (“Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”).

“But they’re also making their own predictions about what’s going to happen in the seventh and last book.”

The final book in J.K. Rowling’s immensely popular Harry Potter series, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” will be released July 21 at 12:01 a.m. in bookstores across the country – 10 days after the premiere of “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” in local theaters.

In Britain, the book’s publishers expect to sell more than three million copies in the first 24 hours. In the United States, the initial printing is for 12 million copies. The book became the No. 1 bestseller on both the Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com Web sites since Feb. 1 – moving in to the top spot within hours of the announced release date.

“We have more than 700 copies reserved here already,” Hazelton said. “It’s huge.”

The bookstore will hold a release party, complete with games and prizes, beginning at 9 p.m. July 20, leading up to the after-midnight release of the book.

Speculation about what will happen in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” has been rampant since the release of the sixth book in the series, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” Rowling has said that the final two installments in the series are like two halves of the same novel – with the new volume picking up where the last left off.

Potter sleuths have pored over an Internet full of speculation. The author, herself, has doled out a few important clues.

Rowling has said the fact that Harry has his mother’s eyes is very important, a fact that will become integral to the final book. She’s also suggested that there is much more to Harry’s Aunt Petunia than we’ve seen thus far, and while she is not magic and will never perform magic, more will be revealed. And she’s suggested that some nonmagical character will perform magic late in life under desperate circumstances.

Rowling has always said that Harry’s uncle, Sirius Black, had to die for a specific reason, and she has lately hinted that the two-way mirror he gave his nephew “will help more than you think.”

After the release of the movie version of “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” Rowling commented that director Alfonso Cuaron “put things in the film that, without knowing it, foreshadow things that are going to happen in the final two books. So I really got goosebumps when I saw a couple of those things, and I thought people are going to look back on the film and think those were put in deliberately as clues.”

Rowling was asked which five of her characters she would most like to invite to a dinner party, she listed Harry, Ron and Hermione, but then hesitated, saying “See … I know who’s actually dead.” That would tend to rule out any of the three heroes meeting an untimely end in the finale.

“These books have been amazing – they’ve helped turn a lot of kids onto reading,” Hazelton said. “We don’t really make anything selling the book (with deeply discounted prices). But it brings so many people into the store that it’s just a great opportunity.”