Review: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J.K. Rowling
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I've been reading Harry Potter books since my first year of college, 16 years of HP fandom here. Midnight releases, staying up all night to get onto Pottermore (the first time around), and so on.

So you can imagine I was excited to find a way to read the play I have no chance of getting to, not while it's only in England anyway. I love scripts anyway (used to read the Twilight Zone ones when I was a kid, heh) so this was a great experience for myself.

Or so I thought.

I've read better fan fiction, much better, in my time of being part of the fandom. Some parts had me cringing, and wanting to put the book down. I'm tough though, and trudged on through.

I can suspend a whole lot of belief, afterall, this carries on in a magical world, so I better be able to. But believing in the majority of the characters was near impossible. The opening with the Trolley Witch was particularly confusing, why is she suddenly some sort of demon? Why is Harry not just a jerk (not new), but flat out horrible at times? Did he never grow up? Apparently not. And suddenly Ron is an alcoholic, okay then.

The language of everyone seemed horribly wrong as well, what happened to the intelligent Hermione? I would have thought she'd have expanded her vocabulary as an adult. Why does Scorpius speak like he lives on reddit when he's not at Hogwarts? Not sure Draco would be happy with that.

Not to mention the weird sexual vibe between Albus and Scorpius the entire time, what was that about?

I finished it in a day (all dialogue, much quicker of a read), so at least it wasn't a week-long slog, but I wish I'd come out of it feeling like this really belonged in the Harry Potter world. Instead, I'm going to accept it for what it is, fan fiction that somehow got JK's blessing to become a play. That I'm not going to feel like I'm missing out on, at all.

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