by Jameson Filston, Campus Carrier Online Editor

The highly anticipated eighth addition to the Harry Potter series hit the shelves this summer and left some mixed reactions. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a theatrical production is currently playing in the Palace Theatre in London. The play is credited to J.K. Rowling, Jack Thorne and John Tiffany, and the script was published as a canonical extension of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. This sequel was very anticipated, but it is controversial because this book is officially the eighth installment despite having multiple authors.

To me, the script felt more like fan fiction than a continuation of the series, which made the experience lose some of the magic that I remember so well from the original books. Because of the format and other factors, the voice of the story was very different, which was off-putting to me because I expected the story to flow with the previous books.

Similarly, many of the elements of the story were very odd. I grew up learning about new magical creatures with Hagrid and loved it when something new was discovered around Hogwarts. Every secret passage that was discovered added to the sense of adventure, and new events like the Triwizard Tournament and the Quidditch World Cup enriched the whole world. Instead of adding similar new elements to the Harry Potter world, the authors made bizarre changes to old characters and objects. The heroes of the previous books were gone, replaced by stern and uncaring shadows of who they once were. 

Part of the draw of the Harry Potter series is that the wizard world is a place readers want to visit. When I read this series growing up, I used to long to ride a broomstick during Quidditch or wish that I had friends like Hermione and Ron. In short, the first seven books were an escape into a world of adventure, not without loss, but where good always triumphed over evil. The first part of the series helped develop a long-lasting love of fantasy that I still have today. However, this new addition to the series changed that for me. 

Instead of comradeship and adventure, this book is about an outcast who is constantly making mistakes. He cannot even fix his own problems and has to be rescued from his own mess. Before this book, there was the awesome trio of Harry, Ron and Hermione. This capable friend group was able to accomplish tasks that even Dumbledore couldn’t. Because they were my age when I read about their story, it gave me a sense of empowerment. 

Albus, the protagonist of Cursed Child and Harry’s son, is not like the heroes that preceded him. His only role in this book is to mess things up, and his life is too much like my own to provide the fantastical escape from reality that made such an impact on me in earlier books. This was written as a script, so it was created for a different medium than the other books in the series. While the classic Harry Potter magic may be present on the stage, it was not evident in the published script.

The curse of this book is that it was preceded by books of such depth and imagination that it can hardly hope to compare.  Michiko Kakutani, a Pulitzer prize winner and critic for the New York Times, wrote that “the script is missing the fully imagined, immersive amplitude of Ms. Rowling’s novels,” and I am inclined to agree. In short, this book is best read when viewed as separate from the rest of the Harry Potter series.