The Guardian has perhaps the best passage so far, "The first kiss - which comes in a Valentine's Day sequence - accurately captures the embarrassment of such moments, although Rowling's responsibility to her much younger readers is clearly forcing her to give Harry and Ron a ridiculously decorous adolescence: no frenzied polishing of their wands in the dormitory after lights out, for example." And the review concludes with:

Rowling is, however, accessory to a sin: a word about the circumstances of this review. Because of the insistence of the writer and her publishers Bloomsbury on releasing the book at midnight on Friday - with no advance review copies - the Guardian convened what is believed to be the world's first ever speed-reviewing team.

Five young assistants - not that young because it was past the target audience's bed-time - joined me in a specially prepared rapid-analysis room in West London where the books were rushed from the Waterstone's branch in Notting Hill precisely as the clocks ticked over from weekday into weekend...took 128 pages each in order to file a group-review for the final edition of the Saturday Guardian. That done, I speed-read on through the night alone, filing this more considered piece at breakfast time.

Writers and publishers may say that no book should be reviewed like this. Well, yes. But no book should be published like this. Rowling and Bloomsbury have turned literature into news, with all the embargos and immediacy that entails. To adopt a tone appropriate to a book about schoolchildren: they started it.

And that is something to keep in mind. Levine on Charlie Rose defended the embargo saying it was for the fun of the event. All of the early reviews are rush jobs (this was also the case with Hillary's book) and perhaps the most interesting will start appearing soon on the many Harry Potter fan sites.