Agreed on the romantic stuff in Book Six (and not just the Ginny stuff, but Ron's immaturity, and the endless teenage tantrums, outburts of jealousy, etc) but I have to say that I thought the portrayal, in Book Five, of Professor Umbridge's increasing control of the school - by the means of a carefully planned and quite meticulously vicious incremental bureaucratic control and abuse of power, was a very convincing picture of petty & vindictive tyranny and how it can be allowed to develop over time. She was evil, but in a banal way, (Hannah Arendt's classic quote about Adolf Eichmann) like the classic time-serving, career-protecting bureaucrat in a vile dictatorship, rather the the completely deranged ideologically driven evil of someone like Voldemort. As such, to find such a convincing portrayal in a novel - especially with that sort of teenage readership in mind - is very impressive to my mind.
