On June 30, 1997, J.K. Rowlings’ “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” was first published in the United Kingdom, which not only rocked the world of recreational reading, but it blurred the lines between children’s and adult lit. With each new edition, the boy who lived dug deeper into the hearts of readers all over the world. As the series came to a close, the fans begged for a continuation. Now, J.K. Rowling has done it and released “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” continuing the adventures of everyone’s favorite wizard.
Well, not really, considering she did not actually write the book — a guy named Jack Thorne did. And, it’s not really a book, but more of a script for a play. Plus, the story is not actually about Harry’s adventure, but his son’s. But we Potterheads shouldn’t mind all that, and just be excited that after nine years, we are finally getting the continuation that we deserve, right? Or should we not settle for a lazily thought-up plot that the author couldn’t even be bothered to change to novel format, chronicling the life of a character that is as irrelevant as Hufflepuff? I choose the latter.
One surefire way to know if reviving something is a bad idea is when all the people involved in the original want little to nothing to do with it. Not only did the original writer Rowling pawn off the story to another writer (a writer whose highest credentials are for writing for the television show “Skins,” a show about the sex and drug-riddled lives of British youth), but the original publisher Bloombury did not publish this new Harry Potter story.
Another surefire sign is when none of the original characters are showcased. As seen in movies like "Daddy Day Camp," "Transformers: Age of Extinction" and all the "Home Alone" movies after the second one, a new character set is never a good sign. A new character set often means the writers are running out of ideas and are scraping at barely their plot lines.
The last is when a book series that is accustomed to a steady book release pace of every one to two years waits nine years to release a book. Did Rowling just decide to take up pottery for nine years, waiting for the perfect time to release her newest story? That sounds quite absurd.
A theory that would make more sense is that, after settling into retirement, Rowling started to feel pressure from delusional Harry Potter fans who could not accept that their favorite series was over, and she was eventually persuaded to create a story out of thin air after perfectly ending the series in her last book. After lazily whipping up a storyline, she could not be bothered to write the whole book because writing books takes time that could be spent twiddling your thumbs, so she found the nearest person with any writing experience and pawned it off to them so she would never have to disappoint anyone ever. But in the end she did disappoint someone. Me.
Harry Potter is one of the most beloved book series of all time. But all great things must come to an end. I would like to remember the Harry Potter series as the series that made kids who feared “Dick and Jane” later grow up to be English majors — not a series that ended in an unmemorable story, with characters I had no attachment to and almost a decade after the plot had already been perfectly capped off. Potterheads do not deserve the sloppy-seconds to the greatest story ever told.
