harry potter and the cursed child book review

Harry and Ginny Potter are preparing their children to run through the barrier to platform nine and three-quarters for two of them to board the Hogwarts Express at the beginning of the school year. This current installment picks up at King’s Cross.

Of course, Harry Potter fans of all ages have a deep understanding of the wizarding world in which Rowling’s characters live. Fortunately, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has copious amounts of stage directions and even snippets of inner thoughts, so even readers with no previous Harry Potter exposure will have plenty of clues. For a reader familiar with reading scripts, this becomes second nature, and for those well-versed in the theatre, a reader’s imagination can run a bit wild thinking about how a given creative team might implement theatre magic to make the story come alive on stage. While written stage directions supply some of the environmental description, some must also be imagined, and character motivations are not explicitly stated, but are instead interpreted from the dialogue. When reading a script, the reader generally must take a much more active role to engage in the story. In addition, the reader is also often lead through the characters’ inner thoughts and motivations, at least as applicable to the author’s chosen point of view. When reading a novel, the reader is often treated to lavish narratives setting the scenes in great detail, sometimes aided by drawings to spark the imagination. There is a difference between a novel and a script. Most fans are relieved that the story is now continuing, picking up nineteen years hence in this new version, but some have been slightly less enthusiastic. Reception by Harry Potter fans worldwide has been overwhelmingly positive. This review discusses only the script as a book, not as commentary on any performance of the material.

The full rehearsal script of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was released on 31 July 2016, one day after the maiden voyage of the play opened in London. Rowling, John Tiffany, and Jack Thorne, and Thorne went on to put this story into the form of a play.

In 2015, a new story synopsis in the Harry Potter oeuvre surfaced. Not only did readers clamber for each new book, the movie industry embraced the stories and released blockbuster adaptations of each one, the last taking two films to fully explore. Rowling released the subsequent books over the next decade with the final installment reaching the shelves in July 2007 with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Intended as the first installment of a seven-part children’s book series, it fortuitously (though unexpectedly) appealed to readers of all ages. Rowling discovered gold when her first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (renamed to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone outside of the U.K.), hit the presses in 1997.

Harry potter and the cursed child book review