Harry Potter is an absolutely classic book series. It’s a wonderful world, filled with amazing characters and interesting storylines. It’s a series I can re-read many times without ever being bored, and I also always feel like I’m learning more about the world and the characters within it. I actually just recently wrote a guest blog post on this website about how I feel to re-read Harry Potter as an adult. Check it out if you’re curious.
I recently read Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and although I was initially sceptical of it because it’s a play and it’s set so far in the future, I did thoroughly enjoy it and it was great to return to the world and find out what happened to my favourite characters from the childhood series.
The format of the book took a little time for me to get used to. It is an easy and quick read because essentially it is just dialogue that you’re reading, but you do have to concentrate on who is speaking and you have to concentrate on the physical scene descriptions to make sure you’ve picked up on everything in the story.
I loved this book. The questions that open up allow the reader to be absorbed back into that world, and through some events in the book (no spoilers!) we see some of our favourite deceased characters return, even if only temporarily. If anything, this book really made me wish that J.K Rowling started another series, either focusing on Harry’s children at school or focusing on Tom Riddle’s years in school. She is so good at plotting a story to build tension and suspense and then the book always propels you into a thrilling conclusion with many questions left unanswered.
I hope that Harry Potter and the Cursed Child isn’t the end of the Wizarding story for us diehard fans. Even though J.K didn’t write this script, she did plot the story herself and she was a part of the production of the play. It is really interesting to see what she envisioned for the characters after the conclusion of the Deathly Hallows, and I really loved the time travel in the book. It allowed the reader to go back to key moments in the series and relive them.
There are many things in the book that caused me to ask more questions, for example there’s a certain event that apparently happened just before the Battle of Hogwarts. This ‘event’ was a real surprise to me – I felt like it wasn’t forshadowed in the original series and it did seem a little odd to me in this play. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. This event propelled the whole plot in Cursed Child anyway, so it helped the story come to life and come into our hands.
I recommend this book to Harry Potter fans, and anyone who has read the original series or seen the movies. If you haven’t read the original books, I recommend you do that before picking this up. It’s not that you’ll have trouble following, because it’s a great storyline and it’s easy to read, but you won’t fully appreciate what’s going on in the book if you don’t understand it’s connection to the original books.
Thank you to Hachette for supplying me with a review copy in exchange for an honest review. I actually bought an extra copy of this book to offer as a giveaway! Feel free to enter below (AUS only).