Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is, first, a play—and second, it was written with J. K. Rowling’s involvement, but still not by her alone. Both of those facts affect the way it’s presented. A play doesn’t really need vivid descriptions or direct access to the characters’ thoughts and feelings. You can’t show all that directly on stage; interpretation is the job of a specific director and a specific production. And having two co-writers as well also makes a difference.
Chronologically, the story begins almost exactly where the last novel of the main series ended—where, in the epilogue, we were shown the now-grown-up Harry, Hermione, and Ron seeing their children off to Hogwarts. Among them is Harry’s second son, Albus Severus Potter.
Up to this point, I hadn’t written reviews of any Harry Potter book. I mean, why would I, when tens (if not hundreds) of millions of people have read them already, so everyone knows what they are and what they’re about. But with this play I decided to make an exception.
On many book-rating platforms, this one has the lowest score of all Harry Potter works. And I was extremely surprised by that, because to me it felt like one of the strongest—if not the strongest—of them all. Yes, I do have one big issue with the internal logic of the narrative, because it seemed to me that the main twist runs against the rules of the world as they were shown to us earlier.
If you don’t want spoilers, skip the next two paragraphs.
So, what do we remember about time-turners in the main series? Hermione was casually given one for her studies so she could attend more classes than would normally be possible. At first she actively used it herself, and then all three of them used it together—which is what the whole chain of events in the third novel is built on. But there was also an important point there: the characters couldn’t change the past. Everything they did had already happened in the past—they just didn’t know it yet. That’s what everything was built on. You couldn’t go back, kill your grandfather, and change the present and future. Everything was already predetermined—including your trip into the past, made in the future.
In the new book (spoiler!), everything is built on the idea that the past can be changed in a way that changes the present as well—to the point where certain people can disappear from the present altogether. So it turns out you really can go and off your grandfather. True, then you most likely won’t exist either. And that’s a completely different concept. Formally, it doesn’t contradict the first one, because the books never explicitly said the past couldn’t be changed like that. It’s just that our heroes didn’t change it. Still, if it were possible to break the present that easily by accident, Hermione probably wouldn’t have been handed such a dangerous artifact so casually. So it feels like they changed the concept on the fly to fit the play.
But the two concepts can still coexist. More than that: even though this new concept is plot-forming, it’s still just a tool, not an end in itself. And that’s why I didn’t take this “flaw” too hard. Which brings me back to the question of why this last book-play is rated so low.
The thing is that even though the play is full of new adventures (now involving two generations: the heroes from the first books and their offspring), it raises themes that are far from interesting to every teenager. The early books, even though they eventually moved very far away from a kind fairy tale, were still about heroism, self-sacrifice, and the struggle against an enemy of everything that exists. That concept is fairly standard for teenage adventure books, even if Rowling managed to make the series damn interesting for adults too.
But in the play, the adventures fade into the background, and the foreground is taken up by the problem of fathers and children, society’s expectations of kids who live under the shadow of their parents’ images, and the expectations of the parents themselves. And of children who suddenly feel they’re not living up to those expectations, and therefore drift farther and farther away from their parents. It seems to me that even though this theme is familiar to many teenagers, it’s the kind of thing that older people are more likely to think about—people who’ve become parents of teenagers themselves.
And a large part of the audience probably saw the new play as a direct continuation of the series for the same people who loved the early books. But The Cursed Child, for me, is a much more grown-up book. It’s more for parents than for kids.
And beyond the adventure side of things, with its own surprises, this play is also good because it shows how people who were branded “bad” from the start can change over time—and how “good” people, under pressure, can be ready for actions that are anything but admirable. And it was really nice for me to see that this time the story let us glimpse the future of the Malfoy family as well—a family that in the main series was presented only in a negative light (which is exactly what you’d expect from teenage books). Here, the sharp lines are blurred, and we’re shown a world where everything is far more complex than a simple division into black and white.
At the same time, the authors try to show that even in a difficult situation—when your child not only can’t, but doesn’t even want to find understanding with you—you can still try to reach it. Unfortunately, in some of the impulsive and not-so-admirable actions of the adult Harry, I sometimes recognized myself. Being a father is hard—and being a good, understanding one is even harder.
This is a genuinely very good book, and I’d like people who look at it not to make up their minds based only on its fairly low average rating. It’s worth reading. And if you have teenage kids of your own, I’m sure that in certain moments—and in certain characters—you’ll recognize yourself too. Teenagers will recognize themselves as well, but more likely a few years later.
Honestly, when I picked up the play, I didn’t expect Rowling and company to dig into themes like this. And I was pleasantly surprised.
My rating: 4.5/5
