Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

I told, I told you three years ago that JULY was still a magical Harry Potter month. I held onto hope, and that hope was rewarded with more fun Harry Potter times.

You know what I'm talking about, right? Last week, at midnight on Harry Potter's birthday (also technically midnight on Neville Longbottom's birthday, Baby Brother pointed out, if you count midnight as the bridge between days), a new play called Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was released.

I had mixed feelings about this play. I couldn't decide if I was going to buy it. I knew that I would read it at some point, but I couldn't decide when that would be. See, next-generation stories are so hard to do, and when the original author isn't the one doing most of the work—well. It's dangerous, that's all.

But all of my reasonable reasonings went out the window when I saw that Barnes and Noble was having a midnight release party. I texted the link to Viola.

Awkward Mormon Girl: Would you ever consider...

She considered it. We decided to go.

See, midnight releases for Harry Potter books are sort of our thing. Viola and I went to the Barnes and Noble release parties for Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows. The Half-Blood Prince party was the year of the treacle incident. Incident recap: we tried to make treacle. We didn't follow the instructions. The treacle was terrible. Yet we maintained a fascination with the stuff and a desire to try some that had been properly made. You could say that we had unfinished business with treacle. Unfortunately, we were not able to finish up the unfinished business during the Deathly Hallows release party due to going with a large group of people who had no interest in helping us make a dessert of murky British origin. We ended up talking about Twilight with them and quoting Harry Potter Puppet Pals instead.

Finally, on July 30th, 2016, we were able to finish our unfinished treacle business.

For my birthday, La Petite and her husband gave me The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook. It contains a treacle recipe, which Viola and I followed to a T.

The result? A caramel-ish fudge.

We tried it. We were all, "Oh, that's what treacle is. Well, let's go to the party now."

It was pretty anticlimactic, really.

The party was fine and everything. Astoundingly, I won a drawing for a t-shirt. Viola and I talked some good talks and ran amok in the Barnes and Noble. (Running amok in a Barnes and Noble consists of sitting on the floor in whatever aisle you choose and eating gummy worms. And if you decide to get up and move to another aisle for no reason, then you just do that, son. It's wild.)

All of that was good and fine, but it was really all just a way to pass the time until they let me get my copy of the play at midnight.

I was maybe the fourth person to get a copy. I really wanted to read all night, the way I did with the sixth and seventh books, but adulthood got in the way and I didn't.

But I read it all in one sitting the next day. And here are my thoughts:

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is no Harry Potter book. But it was also fun. Here are some things that stood out... (Minor, vague spoilers ahead.)

I know a person whose main criticism of the Harry Potter books is that someone should have just used a time-turner to kill Voldemort or save some of his victims. He thinks that's a plot hole. I don't think it's a plot hole, because a) the Ministry of Magic clearly has strict rules and regulations about time-turners, b) using a time-turner to save the life of a hippogriff and help a man escape from jail is much different from using a time-turner to save the life of a person; as lovely as Buckbeak is, he doesn't have the same agency as one of the series' more sentient species, and his death or lack thereof would not affect a timeline the same way a person's death or lack thereof might, and finally c) using a time-turner to go back a few hours to change time is not anywhere near as dangerous as using a time-turner to go back multiple years to change time. More things in a timeline would be affected by changing an event that took place years ago and has had time to compound. For example, if someone went back in time to kill Voldemort before his rise to power, who's to guarantee that his absence wouldn't allow someone even worse to take his place? All of this has always seemed obvious to me, but in any case, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child goes to the trouble of spelling it out: wizards should rarely, if ever, use time travel to fix problems, no matter how good of an idea it may seem.

On the other hand, while the basic premise of the plot made sense, the details were not quite clever enough. At one point, all of the characters were operating under an assumption that I felt would turn out to be false. However, apparently the assumption was true, which threw me for a loop. It just seemed like something that couldn't be true without a lot of explanation.

I have to say that I loved the way Ron and Hermione were portrayed. Now, I don't think this play got the characters quite right. Harry needs to be a little more sassy; Hermione needs to get flustered and start talking in that "shrill" voice that she uses when she's upset; Ron needs to be more clever, more sharply sarcastic, and less vaguely goofy. Yeah, I get that they're adults now, but that doesn't mean they should lose all of their character traits.

That being said, I thought the overall treatment of the characters was way better than the movies. There's a scene in Cursed Child where Ron is the first to volunteer himself for danger to spare Hermione and Harry. It was "If you want to kill Harry, you'll have to kill us, too!" all over again. It was a great way to highlight Ron's key character trait: his deep love for and devotion to the people he cares about. The movies pretty much ignored that part of Ron, leaving him as nothing but the comic relief. And the more they took away from Ron, the more they added to Hermione, until movie Hermione became a sort of perfect goddess who can do nothing wrong. In Cursed Child, though, they showed that Hermione is flawed! They reminded us that without Harry and Ron to mellow her out, Hermione is uptight and humorless.

The kids were fun. Some of them (Rose) were just like one of their parents, while others (Scorpius) were delightfully different. I was disappointed that there wasn't really room in the story for Teddy Lupin, for Albus's siblings, or for the many Weasley cousins. I would have liked some Weasley cousin shenanigans. Maybe they should write another play that is just Weasley cousin shenanigans. Maybe I could write another play that is just Weasley cousin shenanigans. All I have to do is become a famous playwright, and soon.

Anyways, if you're wondering whether you should read this play, I give you a hearty, "Yes!" Just take it with a grain of salt. It's far from perfect, but it's still enjoyable.