Uh-oh, It's Magic

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts One and Two
by ... (deep sigh) John Tiffany & Jack Thorne
Based on an original new story by J.K. Rowling 

This past Memorial Day weekend, one of the channels on our basic cable TV package (yes, we still subscribe) was showing all the Harry Potter movies, and my 10-year-old son stood up and said, "I'm going to read all the Harry Potter books." He then went to his room and started reading the complete set of the seven books, all 4,224 pages of them. By sometime in the middle of July, he was done. He's an amazing kid.

The timing was fortuitous. July 31 happened to be the release date for "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child," which was billed as "The Eighth Story." I think that's a little misleading, but I'll get to that later.

July 31 is also, J.K. Rowling says, Harry Potter's birthday. This year, it was a Sunday, a day on which books aren't usually released. But what are you going to do if you're in the bookselling industry and J.K. Rowling says she wants a Harry Potter book released on a Sunday? You arrange to have the book released on a Sunday.

Anyway, by the time July 31 came around, my son had just finished the series and was itching for more. We bought a copy on its release day at Minneapolis' great Wild Rumpus bookstore, and he read it in a couple days. I read all the Harry Potter books when they first came out, but in the middle of his reading "The Cursed Child," my boy said, "This is the first time I've ever been ahead of you in the Harry Potter books." The day after he was finished, he was heading out the door to take it to his friend's house to loan it to him. I stopped him and said, "Let me read it first!"

The Thing's The Play

I've already alluded to this a couple times in this post, so it's time I got this out of the way. In case you didn't already know, "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" is not really the eighth book in Rowling's phenomenally popular Harry Potter series. It's not even really written by Rowling. It is the script of a new play featuring her characters and based on a new story she wrote. It's not the story she wrote, nor is it a novelization of the play. The book we bought has Rowling's name first, but it was written by playwright Jack Thorne in consultation with Rowling and director John Tiffany.

All of this is to say that Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic tremendously overhyped the release of this book. Bookstores all over the country, and no doubt all over the world, held parties so that kids could buy the book at midnight July 31. Target had the book available at checkout aisles. It sold 2 million copies in its first two days. No doubt many people who buy the book will be disappointed to find that it is not the continuation of the much-loved Harry Potter series, but actually something closer to officially sanctioned fan fiction.


That said, I enjoyed "The Cursed Child," for the most part. I will try to avoid spoilers below.

The story revolves around Albus Severus Potter, Harry and Ginny's younger son, who we first met in the epilogue to "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows." The second son of the most famous wizard in the world, Albus is named after Harry's great heroes Albus Dumbledore and Severus Snape, He carries all three of his names like crushing burdens.

Unlike his father, Albus struggles at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. He finds a best friend in fellow misfit Scorpius, the son of Harry's old antagonist Draco Malfoy. This unlikely pair sets off the main action of the play when they go back in time to try to fix an old injustice, unwittingly setting off a series of events that threaten to destroy everything.

Heavy Meta

Yes, I know. Time travel. This is a plot device we've seen many times before -- not the least instance of which was in "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," which was my favorite book and movie in the series. It's also the plot device of way too many bad sci-fi and fantasy stories, and its use in "The Cursed Child" is a big mark against the book, in my opinion. However, on one level, the plot device really works here.

As a kind of fan fiction, the point of "The Cursed Child" is to return to the world, the characters and the stories Rowling created in those seven books. The play could have returned to that world, as does "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them," the forthcoming movie. However, "The Cursed Child" allows fans to not only revisit The Wizarding World of Harry Potter (as Rowling's trademark styles it) but also spend time with Harry, Hermione, Ron and many of the other characters. What's more, the time-travel device allows fans to revisit and re-imagine key plot points of the beloved books, and to do so in a way that allows "The Cursed Child" to be "canon," as nerds say on the Internet.

In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won't go into what plot points we're talking about. I'll just say that I am very curious to see how all of this -- time travel, costume changes, elaborate sets, magic, etc. -- works in the theater.

Still, magic isn't everything. In fact, if you want a deeper, more adult exploration of magic, you should probably read Lev Grossman's Magicians series. The heart of the story of "The Cursed Child" is in the familiar (and a few new) characters and their relationships to each other -- mostly the intense friendship between Albus and Scorpius, and their strained relationships with their fathers. This kind of complicated family dynamic doesn't appear often in the Harry Potter books -- Harry is an orphan, we never see Hermione's parents, and the Weasleys are mostly there for comic relief. It's nice to see it here.

It was also nice to bond with my son over a book about how fathers and sons can often misunderstand each other, projecting their own pasts and their imagined futures on each other without seeing each other for who they are. That's a kind of time travel, too, now that I think more about it.