Fiction Books of 2007, ranking it at No. 8, and praised Rowling for proving that books can still be a global mass medium. Novelist Elizabeth Hand criticised that "... the spectacularly complex interplay of narrative and character often reads as though an entire trilogy's worth of summing-up has been crammed into one volume." In a starred review from Kirkus Reviews, the reviewer said, "Rowling has shown uncommon skill in playing them with and against each other, and also woven them into a darn good bildungsroman, populated by memorable characters and infused with a saving, irrepressible sense of fun". They also praised the second half of the novel, but criticised the epilogue, calling it "provocatively sketchy". In another review from The Times, reviewer Amanda Craig said that while Rowling was "not an original, high-concept author", she was "right up there with other greats of children's fiction". Craig went on to say that the novel was "beautifully judged, and a triumphant return to form", and that Rowling's imagination changed the perception of an entire generation, which "is more than all but a handful of living authors, in any genre, have achieved in the past half-century". In contrast, Jenny Sawyer of The Christian Science Monitor said that, "There is much to love about the Harry Potter series, from its brilliantly realised magical world to its multilayered narrative", however, "A story is about someone who changes. And, puberty aside, Harry doesn't change much. As envisioned by Rowling, he walks the path of good so unwaveringly that his final victory over Voldemort feels, not just inevitable, but hollow". In The New York Times, Christopher Hitchens compared the series to World War Two-era English boarding school stories, and while he wrote that "Rowling has won imperishable renown" for the series as a whole, he also stated that he disliked Rowling's use of deus ex machina, that the mid-book camping chapters are "abysmally long", and Voldemort "becomes more tiresome than an Ian Fleming villain". Catherine Bennett of The Guardian praised Rowling for putting small details from the previous books and making them large in Deathly Hallows, such as Grindelwald being mentioned on a Chocolate Frog Card in the first book. While she points out "as her critics say, Rowling is no Dickens", she says that Rowling "has willed into a fictional being, in every book, legions of new characters, places, spells, rules and scores of unimagined twists