Just Finished Reading Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Normally when I write one of these articles about books I've just finished reading, I'll take care to include the author's name within the title as a matter of extending proper credit.  With Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which just came out less than a couple of months ago, this would have been a bit too unwieldy.  For although J.K. Rowling, the creator and author of the seven-volume Harry Potter series, is one of those credited with this new book's authorship, so is John Tiffany and Jack Thorne.  And it is ultimately Jack Thorne who is given full credit for having written this story in rehearsal script form...for that's what the book Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is: the rehearsal script for a play.  Already knowing that and having read some Shakespeare as well as Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, I decided to go ahead and plunge into it despite its departure in structure from Rowling's original narrative: after all, plays are literature, too...

The setting for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is again England and Scotland, as it is nineteen years (and beyond) after the climactic end to the original series, at the close of the seventh book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  At that book's very end, a glimpse is given of Potter's "future" life and his family as he sends his worried son Albus off to Hogwarts Academy for the very first time.  The new story picks up where that railway station scene leaves off.  Albus, whose life is constantly submerged under the greatness accorded his father while being unfairly compared to him, finds himself sinking into despair and cynicism at Hogwarts...with his only friend in the world coming from the unlikeliest of families.  And that is where I will leave you, the reader, to go find out for yourself "the rest of the story", as radio icon Paul Harvey used to say on his show...

Without wanting to spoil the story for anyone, I will say, however, that much...in my opinion, far too much...of the narrative in The Cursed Child is derivative, not original, in nature, drawing heavily upon previous Harry Potter stories.  And there is a certain literary device commonly used in science fiction stories...as well as in the third Harry Potter book...that is grossly overused here.  Once you get a little ways into the story, you'll know what I'm talking about.  However, having gone into reading Harry Potter and the Cursed Child with subdued expectations, I've come out of the experience recommending it to others, albeit without the accolades I might have extended to a work entirely of Rowling's.  As a matter of fact, the story is so derivative of her earlier works that I wonder how much writing, if any, "J.K." herself actually contributed to this tale that, at least partially, bears her name in the credits...