My Thoughts on Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J.K. Rowling, John Tiffany, Jack Thorne 
Published by Arthur A. Levine Books on July 31st 2016
Genres: Young Adult Fiction, Fantasy
Pages: 327
Source: Purchased
Amazon
Goodreads
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Goodreads Synopsis: Based on an original new story by J.K. Rowling, Jack Thorne and John Tiffany, a new play by Jack Thorne, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is the eighth story in the Harry Potter series and the first official Harry Potter story to be presented on stage. The play will receive its world premiere in London’s West End on July 30, 2016.
It was always difficult being Harry Potter and it isn’t much easier now that he is an overworked employee of the Ministry of Magic, a husband and father of three school-age children.
While Harry grapples with a past that refuses to stay where it belongs, his youngest son Albus must struggle with the weight of a family legacy he never wanted. As past and present fuse ominously, both father and son learn the uncomfortable truth: sometimes, darkness comes from unexpected places.
My Review:
I read Harry Potter and the Cursed Child a few weeks ago and it has taken me this long to decide how I feel about what I read. Conflicted is probably the best way to describe my reaction. There were definitely a few elements that I loved, but at the same time, there were a number of things that were rather disappointing.
As with all play scripts, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is clearly meant to be watched rather than just read. The written text and descriptions are sparse and somewhat bland because they are waiting for the director and the actors to work their magic and breathe life into it. I actually wish I could see the play because I’m sure it’s wildly entertaining and my review of that would be glowing; however, since I only have the written text to go on, here are my relatively spoiler-free thoughts on the story.
I thought it was very exciting to see a whole new generation of witches and wizards heading off to Hogwarts. It was especially interesting to follow Harry’s son Albus and see how he fared as he tried to live up to his father’s tremendous legacy.
As much I liked Albus, though, and I NEVER thought I would ever say this, but the character who really stole my heart in this story was Draco Malfoy’s son, Scorpius. I can’t really go into details without giving away too much of the play, but the friendship that he forges with Albus Potter when they meet on the way to Hogwarts was just so wonderful to see, probably, in part, because it’s just so completely unexpected to anyone who has read the original books and is familiar with all of the bad blood between Harry and Draco.
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That said, one of my biggest disappointments of the story is how little time was actually spent at Hogwarts. Perhaps the timing/pacing works better on stage than it does on paper, but the play breezed through entire years at Hogwarts in the span of just a couple of scenes. This bothered me because, for me, it meant that the most enjoyable parts of the Harry Potter series were stripped away. When I read the books, I always loved all of the normal day-to-day happenings — Harry and his friends going to class, playing Quidditch, their interactions with Hagrid, McGonagal, Snape, the ghosts that roamed the halls, etc. Pardon the pun, but for me, that’s the magic of the Harry Potter series and what makes it so special. To be mostly finished with Hogwarts less than a third of the way through the story left me feeling out of sorts.
Speaking of feeling out of sorts, while I felt very nostalgic about revisiting Harry and the gang all grown up, I have to say the experience wasn’t what I hoped it would be. I don’t know if it was because I was reading a script rather than a novel, but Harry, Ron, and the others just didn’t seem quite like the characters I had grown to love over the years. They just seemed stiff and stilted and several of their personalities, Ginny’s in particular, just seemed off. I know they’re adults now rather than children, and that people grow and change, but it still just seemed a bit off. In considering the way they came across, I can understand why some have said it reminds them of fanfiction. And this is probably a bit shallow on my part, but I was also a little disappointed in the career paths most of them were on. I guess I was expecting bigger and better things for them after having defeated Voldemort all those years ago, but as I read what each of them were up to, I just kept thinking to myself: “Really? That’s it?” Ron, in particular, was a disappointment, as he is just working in the Weasley’s joke shop.
With the exception of enjoying watching Albus and Scorpius becoming friends, I was disappointed enough early on that I actually considered giving up on the story around the halfway point. I’m glad I chose to push on though because I really did enjoy the second half much more than I did the first. It finally started to feel more like a Harry Potter story as the action really picked up and as events from the actual series, such as the Triwizard Tournament from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, were revisited and incorporated into the play’s narrative. It took me about 4 days to read the first half of the play, but I flew through the second half in just a few hours.
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Overall, I’d have to say that I liked Harry Potter and the Cursed Child but I had some issues with it. I would still recommend it to any fan of the original series though because I do think it’s an interesting take on where they might be as adults. I also think if you keep in mind that it’s a script rather than a lengthy and descriptive novel like we’re used to reading and adjust your expectations accordingly, then you’ll have a more pleasant reading experience and can just bask in the nostalgia of seeing your favorite characters in a new way.
Rating: Tough to rate, but I’m going to say 3 stars (1-2 stars for the beginning, closer to 5 stars for the second half).
About J.K. Rowling
From Goodreads: Although she writes under the pen name J.K. Rowling, pronounced like rolling, her name when her first Harry Potter book was published was simply Joanne Rowling. Anticipating that the target audience of young boys might not want to read a book written by a woman, her publishers demanded that she use two initials, rather than her full name. As she had no middle name, she chose K as the second initial of her pen name, from her paternal grandmother Kathleen Ada Bulgen Rowling. She calls herself Jo and has said, “No one ever called me ‘Joanne’ when I was young, unless they were angry.” Following her marriage, she has sometimes used the name Joanne Murray when conducting personal business. During the Leveson Inquiry she gave evidence under the name of Joanne Kathleen Rowling. In a 2012 interview, Rowling noted that she no longer cared that people pronounced her name incorrectly.
Rowling was born to Peter James Rowling, a Rolls-Royce aircraft engineer, and Anne Rowling (née Volant), on 31 July 1965 in Yate, Gloucestershire, England, 10 miles (16 km) northeast of Bristol. Her mother Anne was half-French and half-Scottish. Her parents first met on a train departing from King’s Cross Station bound for Arbroath in 1964. They married on 14 March 1965. Her mother’s maternal grandfather, Dugald Campbell, was born in Lamlash on the Isle of Arran. Her mother’s paternal grandfather, Louis Volant, was awarded the Croix de Guerre for exceptional bravery in defending the village of Courcelles-le-Comte during the First World War.
Rowling’s sister Dianne was born at their home when Rowling was 23 months old. The family moved to the nearby village Winterbourne when Rowling was four. She attended St Michael’s Primary School, a school founded by abolitionist William Wilberforce and education reformer Hannah More. Her headmaster at St Michael’s, Alfred Dunn, has been suggested as the inspiration for the Harry Potter headmaster Albus Dumbledore.
As a child, Rowling often wrote fantasy stories, which she would usually then read to her sister. She recalls that: “I can still remember me telling her a story in which she fell down a rabbit hole and was fed strawberries by the rabbit family inside it. Certainly the first story I ever wrote down (when I was five or six) was about a rabbit called Rabbit. He got the measles and was visited by his friends, including a giant bee called Miss Bee.” At the age of nine, Rowling moved to Church Cottage in the Gloucestershire village of Tutshill, close to Chepstow, Wales. When she was a young teenager, her great aunt, who Rowling said “taught classics and approved of a thirst for knowledge, even of a questionable kind,” gave her a very old copy of Jessica Mitford’s autobiography,Hons and Rebels. Mitford became Rowling’s heroine, and Rowling subsequently read all of her books.
Rowling has said of her teenage years, in an interview with The New Yorker, “I wasn’t particularly happy. I think it’s a dreadful time of life.” She had a difficult homelife; her mother was ill and she had a difficult relationship with her father (she is no longer on speaking terms with him). She attended secondary school at Wyedean School and College, where her mother had worked as a technician in the science department. Rowling said of her adolescence, “Hermione [a bookish, know-it-all Harry Potter character] is loosely based on me. She’s a caricature of me when I was eleven, which I’m not particularly proud of.” Steve Eddy, who taught Rowling English when she first arrived, remembers her as “not exceptional” but “one of a group of girls who were bright, and quite good at English.” Sean Harris, her best friend in the Upper Sixth owned a turquoise Ford Anglia, which she says inspired the one in her books.
About Jack Thorne
Jack Thorne (born 6 December 1978) is an English screenwriter and playwright.
Born in Bristol, England, he has written for radio, theatre and film, most notably on the TV shows Skins, Cast-offs, This Is England ’86, This Is England ’88, This Is England ’90, The Fades, The Last Panthers and the feature film The Scouting Book for Boys. He currently lives in London.
About John Tiffany
John Tiffany trained at Glasgow University gaining an MA in Theatre and Classics. He was Literary Director for the Traverse Theatre, Associate Director for Paines Plough and a founding Associate Director for the National Theatre of Scotland. He is currently an Associate Director for the Royal Court Theatre. During 2010-11 John was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University.
Work for the Royal Court includes: THE TWITS, HOPE, LET THE RIGHT ONE IN and THE PASS.
Work for the National Theatre of Scotland includes: LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, MACBETH, ENQUIRER, PETER PAN, THE HOUSE OF BERNARDA ALBA, TRANSFORM CAITHNESS: HUNTER, BE NEAR ME, NOBODY WILL EVER FORGIVE US, THE BACCHAE, BLACK WATCH, ELIZABETH GORDON QUINN and HOME: GLASGOW. For BLACK WATCH, John won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Director and a Critics’ Circle Award.
On Broadway, John directed THE GLASS MENAGERIE (also A.R.T.), MACBETH, and ONCE, which won 8 Tony Awards in 2012, including Best Musical and Best Direction of a Musical.
Other work includes: THE AMBASSADOR (Brooklyn Academy of Music), JERUSALEM (West Yorkshire Playhouse), LAS CHICAS DEL TRES Y MEDIA FLOPPIES (Granero Theatre, Mexico City and Edinburgh Festival Fringe), IF DESTROYED TRUE, MERCURY FUR, HELMET and THE STRAITS (Paines Plough), GAGARIN WAY, ABANDONMENT, AMONG UNBROKEN HEARTS, PERFECT DAYS and PASSING PLACES (Traverse, Edinburgh).
John is also working on the stage play of HARRY POTTER AND THE CURSED CHILD with J.K. Rowling and Jack Thorne, which opened in the West End in June 2016.
I’ve been on the fence about reading this. I’m not a fan of scripted books, personally. I just feel like (even though I probably never will) I’d rather watch this on stage.
I hear you on that. There are very few plays that I enjoy reading, namely those by Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams. If I thought there was any chance of me watching HP and the Cursed Child on stage, I probably wouldn’t have read it.
I’ve read so many not-so-great reviews on this, I’m torn as to whether I want to read it. I thought the series ended perfectly and even though it’s fun to speculate on what happens to the characters after the last chapter ends, I worry that it might ruin the magic of the series for me!
It’s a tough call. I chose to read it anyway and decided that I’m just not going to think of it as an eighth book because, like you, I loved the way the series ended and this doesn’t add anything to that. It was interesting to read if you think of it as strictly like an alternate universe kind of thing.
I read this one and ended up giving it four stars because it still made me laugh and it made me cry and I loved being back in the world of Harry Potter again. In saying that I never expected an 8th book and thought the original series was pretty perfect. This was just a bit of a spin-off for me and a chance to meet new characters and see what has happened to old beloved characters.
It’s a great review.
I’m glad you enjoyed it 🙂
The reviews for this have been very varied, but above all else, I still don’t know how to feel about the play format. It’s the only thing that has kept me from reading it.
I know what you mean. If there was any way I could actually see it on stage, I probably would not have read it because it’s definitely made to be seen. I probably would have enjoyed it more than I did if it was written like a novel instead.
*sighs* Honestly, this is what I was afraid of. :\ I wasn’t planning on reading this in the first place just because I was nervous it would disappoint me and ruin my love for the series, so I’m sad to hear you felt so ambivalent about it. 🙁 Nonetheless, thanks for sharing and, as always, fabulous review! <3
Thanks! Yes, seems like the reviews for it are all over the place. People either really loved it, hated it, or like me, didn’t really know how to feel. I personally think you just have to separate it your mind from the series as much as possible to preserve the original storyline and intended ending.
i felt it was a bit farfetched, with Delphi (Voldemort and Bellatrix had a what??, a child!) and I have to agree, Ron was so unlike himself and Harry wasn’t too likeable either. It didn’t seem as magical, and i think it was really best as a play and not a book!
Yeah, it actually surprised me how unlikeable Harry was. I never expected to ever feel anything but love for him.