Dear J.K. Rowling,
We have a long history together even though you don't know me. I'm one of the millions of children that grew up with your magical characters by my side. They were more than bed time stories to me. They were the best friends I followed on adventures. They were the ones who showed me what it meant to be a friend. That meant apologizing for being a git when my friend was drawn for the Triwizard Tournament and not me, or my friend got the part I wanted in the play. It also meant supporting your friends when dementors were making them sad or maybe it was just the depression talking. It meant believing in the nargles or believing in yourself.
They were the friends I was so happy to have. And i was ready to follow to the trap door underneath a three headed dog, a chamber in the girls bathroom that contained a very large snake, running after a werewolf into a feisty tree, battling a dragon, flying on thresals to the ministry, tagging along with your professor to a haunted cave, running from death eaters and Voldemort through all of Great Britain, and finally battling at Hogwarts.
Not all of my friends made it out alive. The ones that didn't died valiant deaths in sacrifice for others. I learned how to grieve with my friends in your stories and I learned how to keep going.
I wanted to be brave like Harry, intelligent like Hermione, funny like Ron, cute like Dobby, wise like Dumbledore, enduring like McGonnegal, and loyal like Snape.
Their stories lifted off the page and became a safe place for me even when the world inside the binding was not. Hogwarts became everything I ever wanted. And my letter was something I'll always be waiting for.
As an American reading, I always wanted to know where I'd go if I did get my letter. Surely Hogwarts wasn't the closest school of witchcraft and wizardry for me. So when you released the story on the American school, Ilvermorny, and the houses of Ilvermorny, I almost cried. Thunderbird, Horned Serpent, Pukwudgie, and Wampus were the houses I could actually be in and POTTERMORE had all the answers for me.
The continuation of the story on POTTERMORE made it easy to keep my love for the wizarding world alive. However, when you wrote "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" I was expecting another story that would hold me close and while it was a good story, I didn't feel like it was all yours. You have ornate characters and long vivid descriptors. This did not have those. Maybe because it was a script instead of a story, but I felt blind in comparison to your other work. There were minor things that just didn't feel right like Draco MAlfoy calling Harry Potter anything other than "Potter", Ron and the simple and humorous life he leads didn't seem right. The characters were interesting I felt attached to them, but they didn't feel fully developed. I felt like I was reading the script version from someone else of the book you could have written.
I get that Harry Potter isn't the only thing you want to write. You're an author and you've got a million stories in that beautiful brain of yours, but that script didn't feel like you at all. I commend you for working on a script. That's different and daring or you, but it didn't even feel remotely like you. The descriptors were short. They didn't feel like you wanted us to really see the world like you had before.
I'll forever love you and Harry Potter for being such a big part of my childhood, however, this last book didn't feel like the incredible canon I was so used to reading. I guess I hope the play is incredible because the script made me feel far away.
With lots of love and adoration,
A Potterhead
