J K Rowling. Successful or not, that amount of alliteration when naming characters shows a laziness that's inexcusable. Also if you're going to toss token ethnics into the mix try harder than 'Padme Patel' and fucking 'Cho Chang' That's not just lazy, it's borderline racist. Finally if you're going to use poorly disguised french to attempt to call your bad guy Lord Murder at least check first that Vol De Mort translates as murder instead of Lord Death Flight.
I will grant you that her work improves towards the end of the series and it's not that I didn't find the books diverting but there's a reason her work since has bombed hard. Casual Vacancy was a shit attempt to try and turn herself into a latter day Agatha Christie and it was a laughable mess of a novel that had little to no charm or suspense.
You have to take into account that the majority of the series was written for children and young adults. Having read the books recently, I have to agree with Bradsternum that the story by itself is great, but how it's written is just pretty awful. The alliterative naming scheme, however, isn't something you find
just in Harry Potter, though - you find it in various other works of literature, and the biggest place you can find alliteration in nomenclature are Marvel comics; in this case, it was to make it easier for the intended audience to remember the names. I see you only sight Padma Patil and Cho Chang as the token ethnics, when you also have Parvati Patil, Dean Thomas, Blaise Zabini, and... yeah, that's pretty much it.
On another note, there are three things the French word
voler can mean. It can mean "to fly", "to flee", and "to steal".
Voler de mort can mean "to fly from death", "to flee from death", or "to steal from death", and the name Voldemort is derived from
voleur (one who flies/flees/steals)
de mort (from death). Though poorly disguised French, Voldemort is meant to be a portmanteau of
voleur de mort, as it's explained he has divided his soul into eight pieces (though one is unintentional) in a vain attempt to escape death, which he fears immensely. The average child probably won't be able to figure out this bit of nomenclature, anyway, so why bother. There's only one other instance where she uses French, which is in one chapter of Goblet of Fire where they're fleeing the World Cup and run into some French girl; the grammar in that one fragment of a sentence is just appalling.
