Title: Harry Potter and The Cursed Child
Release Date: 31 July 2016
Author: J.K. Rowling
About This Book
It was always difficult being Harry Potter and it isn’t much easier now that he is an overworked employee of the Ministry of Magic, a husband and father of three school-age children.
While Harry grapples with a past that refuses to stay where it belongs, his youngest son Albus must struggle with the weight of a family legacy he never wanted. As past and present fuse ominously, both father and son learn the uncomfortable truth: sometimes, darkness comes from unexpected places.
Book Review
J. K. Rowling’s magical seven-volume Harry Potter series is the ultimate bildungsroman, tracing that young wizard’s coming of age, as he not only battles evil but also struggles to come to terms with the responsibilities, losses and burdens of adulthood. In the course of those books, we see a plucky schoolboy, torn by adolescent doubts and confusions, grow into an epic hero, kin to King Arthur, Luke Skywalker and Spider-Man.
Now, in a play set 19 years later, we get to see how this legendary hero has settled into middle age as a civil servant in London, working at the Ministry of Magic. More important, we get to see Harry as a father — and his teenage son Albus’s efforts to cope with the suffocating expectations that come with having a famous father. “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” is about the journey Albus takes while growing up, and the roles he and his best friend, Scorpius (Draco Malfoy’s son), play when dark forces, perhaps in league with Voldemort, once again threaten the fate of the planet.