As soon as I heard that "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" was an actual thing, I flipped. I got the book/play the day after it was released and read it all in one sitting. Realistically, I don’t know what I was expecting.
Harry Potter was such a huge part of my life and growing up, that after the last movie was released, I felt kind of empty. There were no more adventures to go on with Harry, Ron, and Hermione. No more spells, wand-waving, and robes. And although Rowling gave us a happy ending, I still wasn't satisfied. How could I be? Harry’s story had been with me since I learned how to read properly. Now, fifteen years after the first book was released, I got to revisit my favorite characters and see how they were doing.
It was strange to see Harry this way. Fatherhood, to be honest, did not suit him so well. Maybe it was because I had read so much of Harry as a teenager. Either way, Harry had not lost his strong beliefs, stubbornness, or selflessness. He was just as reckless as he had been nineteen years ago. As much as I loved to see how his relationships with Ron and Hermione had evolved between the stories, it was frustrating to see how incapable he was as a father.
Ron and Hermione had always been sort of dysfunctional in the original stories, so it was refreshing to see how mature and put together they were as a couple here. Apart from the characters, the storyline disappointed me a little. As soon as I knew what the storyline was, my expectations were that it would be more magical – as in, more magic would be involved. In fact, it was more of a space-time continuum sort of issue Albus and Scorpius were dealing with. Which, isn’t bad, but was disappointing for me personally because I was looking forward to the kind of action that Harry himself had experienced.
Overall, there was a sense of familiarity that was welcoming. Although the story followed Albus and Scorpius, there were snippets of the original three that made me feel like some things had never changed. I could see how the fictional people I grew up reading about turned out. At the end of the day, it was not the greatest continuation of the story, but it was a cathartic read.
