JESS JUST READS

A BOOK REVIEW BLOG

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald Screenplay by J.K Rowling

J.K. Rowling’s five-film Fantastic Beasts adventure series continues with the original screenplay for Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

The Wizarding World journey continues . . .

The powerful Dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald was captured in New York with the help of Newt Scamander. But, making good on his threat, Grindelwald escapes custody and sets about gathering followers, most of whom are unsuspecting of his true agenda: to raise pure-blood wizards up to rule over all non-magical beings.

In an effort to thwart Grindelwald’s plans, Albus Dumbledore enlists Newt, his former Hogwarts student, who agrees to help once again, unaware of the dangers that lie ahead. Lines are drawn as love and loyalty are tested, even among the truest friends and family, in an increasingly divided wizarding world.

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is the second screenplay in a five-film series to be written by J.K. Rowling, author of the internationally bestselling Harry Potter books. Set in 1927, a few months after the events of Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, and moving from New York to London, Paris and even back to Hogwarts, this story of mystery and magic reveals an extraordinary new chapter in the wizarding world. Illustrated with stunning line art from MinaLima with some surprising nods to the Harry Potter stories that will delight fans of both the books and films.

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is the second in the Fantastic Beasts series, this time focusing heavily on Credence and Grindelwald and the havoc that Grindelwald wreaks across New York, London and Paris.

To be completely honest, I could barely remember what happened in the first Fantastic Beasts story and it was fine. Don’t stress too much if it’s been too long between stories. After 50 pages or so, your memory will jog and you’ll be able to follow along easily.

Dumbledore: Do you know why I admire you, Newt? More, perhaps, than any man I know? You don’t seek power or popularity. You simply ask, is the thing right in itself? If it is, then I must do it, no matter the cost.

I was mostly interested in Credence Barebone and Grindelwald, and how their storylines connected. Grindelwald is cunning, strategic and smart, escaping capture and rallying followers.

One of the biggest surprises for Harry Potter fans is that Nagini, Voldemort’s snake, is actually an adult woman. She’s a Maledictus,meaning she is able to transform into a snake but because of a blood curse passed down in her family, one day she won’t be able to turn back. So, all those times we see Nagini in the Harry Potter series, she is a woman trapped in a snake’s body. But in the Fantastic Beasts series, she can transform as she wishes. I found this fascinating — a surprise I didn’t see coming.

I couldn’t help but feel a little let down by the pacing of the story, and the lack of tension or climax. It doesn’t feel like enough happens in the story, and there’s a fair bit of unnecessary conversations and subplots.

Leta: Oh Newt. You never met a monster you couldn’t love.

There were a few inconsistencies in the plot and the world building. For example, we briefly visit Hogwarts and McGonagall is there teaching. But, if you look at the year in which the book is set, I don’t think she’s even been born then?

Also, the ending of the book, and the biggest twist of all, was a little unbelievable. I don’t want to give anything away, but the sudden acknowledgement of a long lost family member that we didn’t even know existed? It seemed like they wanted to stretch out this series for five books, when really I’m not sure there’s enough material.

This is a must-read for fans of the Harry Potter franchise. It’s a beautiful hardback book with gorgeous green and gold packaging, perfect for fans who want it as a collectors item.

Thank you to the publisher for sending me a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald Screenplay
J.K Rowling
November 2018
Hachette Book Publishers

REVIEW AND GIVEAWAY: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J.K Rowling

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).

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Potterhead July: What It’s Like Re-Reading Harry Potter as an Adult

This month I’m participating in Potterhead July, run by Aentee at Read at Midnight. All month long, book blogs (about 85 of them!) are posting about Harry Potter! The bloggers have chosen what they’d like to talk about, and for my blog post, I’ve chosen to write about what it’s like to re-read Harry Potter as an adult when you spent so much of your childhood loving the books.

Some part of me wishes that I could read Harry Potter for the first time again, where the characters were unknown and the plot a surprise and the endings all shocking and suspenseful. Harry Potter is one of the greatest children’s book series that I’ve ever come across – J.K Rowling created a world of magic that every child wanted to be a part of, filled with wonderful characters and friendships and heroism.

I recently re-read Harry Potter again. I’ve re-read it many times since I was a child, and with each re-read I discover things that I didn’t know before. There’ll be a sneaky line between dialogue that hints at a twist later in the book – a sneaky line I had missed all those times before that I’d read the book. Or perhaps there’ll be a particularly hilarious conversation between two characters full of innuendos that I hadn’t understood as a child. And as a child, there would’ve been many ‘big picture’ issues about the Ministry of Magic and the betrayal from certain characters that I just wouldn’t have understood, but I now do.

Re-reading Harry Potter as an adult can be very rewarding. The first few books are quite short and don’t take long to read, and you come to understand more about the world and the characters. However, what you miss is that childhood love for the world and that desperation to keep reading to find out about more spells, characters, secret passageways and potions. The entire series is complete and re-reading it is not going to stop that.

J.K Rowling could easily begin a new series in this world – James and Lily Potter’s story, or perhaps the story of Harry’s son at Hogwarts. I have no doubt J.K Rowling could come up with a villain just as scary and brilliant as Voldemort. But maybe we don’t need another series. J.K did such a marvellous job of making sure that every question was answered at some point in the series. Things that happened in the second book made sense in the sixth, even though we didn’t even pick up on anything being wrong (I didn’t think twice about Riddle’s diary until it was revealed to have been a Horcrux all along later in the series).

Maybe Harry Potter is meant to be one of those series where you spend your adult life participating in multiple re-reads. But if we had magic like the characters in the book, wouldn’t it be just fantastic if we could travel back and read it for the first time all over again?

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling

Harry Potter is lucky to reach the age of thirteen, since he has already survived the murderous attacks of the feared Dark Lord on more than one occasion. But his hopes for a quiet term concentrating on Quidditch are dashed when a maniacal mass-murderer escapes from Azkaban, pursued by the soul-sucking Dementors who guard the prison. It’s assumed that Hogwarts is the safest place for Harry to be. But is it a coincidence that he can feel eyes watching him in the dark, and should he be taking Professor Trelawney’s ghoulish predictions seriously?

It’s hard to review these books and find different things to say about each one – it’s too easy to talk about plot instead of writing style.

This story is definitely the most intriguing so far because – unlike the first two – Voldemort doesn’t feature in the book. Sure, Voldemort is mentioned in the book and the events directly RELATE to Voldemort, but he doesn’t actually appear in the book. And this novel is where we finally get some background information about Harry’s parents and their murder.

The twist at the end with Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew is a real shock for first-time readers, and it’s nice that Harry finds a family member in this novel (even if it’s only short-lived). The time turner is a nice plot device that J.K. Rowling used, and it really helped to tie in all of the questions/mysteries/confusions at the end of the book.

There were a few things about this third instalment that I disagreed with. Firstly, Harry seems to conveniently overhear all of these important conversations. He just HAPPENS to be in the right place at the right time, almost every time. And I know that sometimes he’s under his invisibility cloak, but these people seem to have these important conversations in easily accessible locations. For example, Harry, Hermione, and Ron go for Butterbeer at Hogsmeade and the teachers are at the next table talking about how Sirius Black is Harry’s Godfather. That seems a little too easy.

In the later novels, Harry gets visibly annoyed at Dumbledore because he knows SO MUCH but really doesn’t help Harry or share information with Harry as often as he could. Readers get the first inclination of that in this novel. At the end of the novel, Dumbledore hints to Hermione that she can use the Time Turner for good, but if they hadn’t of done it, or if Harry and Hermione were unconscious from the attack, would Dumbledore have done it himself? Or left it for the others still? Dumbledore seems all-knowing all the time, but doesn’t seem to actually help Harry that often.

My Score: 8/10
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Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling

Harry Potter can’t wait for his holidays with the dire Dursleys to end. But a small, self-punishing house-elf warns Harry of mortal danger awaiting him at Hogwarts. Returning to the castle nevertheless, Harry hears a rumour about a Chamber of Secrets, holding unknown horrors for wizards of Muggle parentage. Now someone is casting spells that turn people to stone, and a terrible warning is found painted on the wall. The chief suspect – always in the wrong place – is Harry. But something much more terrifying has yet to be unleashed.

Harry is a much stronger character in the second novel. He’s less indecisive and doesn’t doubt himself as much, and seems more driven to uncover information about Draco and the Chamber of Secrets. Professor Lockhart is a hilarious character, and I loved his interaction with Harry. I do wish more of his dialogue made it into the film – his hilarious comments about Harry wanting fame should’ve made it into the movie! I read all of these books before the films all came out, and now that I’m re-reading them, I have all of the actors in my mind. I wonder what I thought of this novel when I read it for the first time.

Some of the twists in the book were predictable (like Tom Riddle being a bad character and how Draco wasn’t the one who opened the Chamber of Secrets), but I didn’t see the twist with Ginny coming (obviously I did this time around because I’m re-reading it, but the first time I read it, that twist was a huge shock). And J.K Rowling really planned out everything so that it all made sense and it all paralleled each other in the novel. For example, you came to understand the significance of Harry being a parselmouth in this book.

J.K. Rowling also gives more information about this wizarding world. I think with fantasy, particularly children’s fantasy, there’s a tendency to dump all this information in the first book so that the reader knows absolutely everything from the start. But I love that new students and new parts of the castle are introduced to the reader in this book.

This book is only about 250 pages, so it can easily be read in an afternoon (this cannot be said for books four, five, six, and seven). Like the first one, I recommend this book to every single person, because it’s an enriching tale and the characters are three dimensional and fleshed out to the reader. Also, this book gives the reader a teaser of information about a few things to come in the later books (why Harry is a parselmouth, Horcruxes, and the prophecy).

My Score: 10/10
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