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Summary
Summary
Based on an original new story by J.K. Rowling, John Tiffany, and Jack Thorne, a new play by Jack Thorne, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is the eighth story in the Harry Potter series and the first official Harry Potter story to be presented on stage.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.Age Range: 10 and Up | Grade Level: 5 and Up | Lexile Measure: 500L
Author Notes
J. K. (Joanne Kathleen) Rowling was born in Gloucestershire, U. K. on July 31, 1965. She also writes fiction novels under the name of Robert Galbraith. Rowling attended Tutshill Primary and then went on to Wyedean Comprehensive where she was made Head Girl in her final year. She received a degree in French from Exeter University. She later took some teaching classes at Moray House Teacher Training College and a teacher-training course in Manchester, England. This extensive education created a perfect foundation to spark the Harry Potter series that Rowling is renowned for.
After college, Rowling moved to London to work for Amnesty International, where she researched human rights abuses in Francophone Africa, and worked as a bilingual secretary. In 1992, Rowling quit office work to move to Portugal and teach English as a Second Language. There she met and married her husband, a Portuguese TV journalist. But the marriage dissolved soon after the birth of their daughter. It was after her stint teaching in Portugal that Rowling began to write the premise for Harry Potter. She returned to Britain and settled in Edinburgh to be near her sister, and attempted to at least finish her book, before looking for another teaching job. Rowling was working as a French teacher when her book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published in June of 1997 and was an overnight sensation.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone won the British Book Awards Children's Book of the Year, was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Award, and received a Commended citation in the Carnegie Medal awards. She also received 8,000 pounds from the Scottish Arts Council, which contributed to the finishing touches on The Chamber of Secrets. Rowling continued on to win the Smarties Book Prize three years in a row, the only author ever to do so. At the Bologna Book Fair, Arthur Levine from Scholastic Books, bought the American rights to Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone for the unprecedented amount of $105,000.00. The book was retitled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone for it's American release, and proceeded to top the Best Seller's lists for children's and adult books. The American edition won Best of the Year in the School Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Parenting Magazine and the Cooperative Children's Book Center. It was also noted as an ALA Notable Children's Book as well as Number One on the Top Ten of ALA's Best Books for Young Adults. The Harry Potter Series consists of seven books, one for each year of the main character's attendance at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. All of the books in the series have been made into successful movies. She is number 1 on the Hollywood Reporter's '25 Most Powerful Authors' 2016 list. She has also written Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Quidditch Through the Ages, and The Tales of Beedle the Bard. She won the 2016 PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award. In 2016 she, along with Jack Thorne and John Tiffany, published the script of the play Harry Potter and the cursed child. It became an instant bestseller.
Rowling's first novel for an adult audience,The Casual Vacancy, was published by Little Brown in September 2012. She made The New York Times Best Seller List with her title Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination. She published two bestselling fiction novels under the name of Robert Galbraith: The Cuckoo's Calling and The Silkworm.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
School Library Journal Review
Playwright Thorne and director Tiffany (who previously collaborated on Hope and Let the Right One In) worked with J.K. Rowling to extend the "Harry Potter" universe with an eighth "installment" in the form of the script from the new West End production. The book starts where the last chapter of Deathly Hallows left off-19 years after the main events of the series-with Harry, Ginny, Ron, and Hermione all saying goodbye to their children as they leave for Hogwarts. As Albus, Harry and Ginny's youngest son, attends Hogwarts, he is plagued by the Potter legacy-something he never wanted-and, as he's sorted into Slytherin, is terrible at Quidditch, and constantly compared to his famous father, he becomes reclusive and angsty. His sole friend is Scorpius Malfoy, the only son of Draco Malfoy-prompting further separation from his father. When Albus hatches a plot to go back in time to save the life of Cedric Diggory-what Albus views as the biggest mistake his father made-time becomes distorted and Harry is left to examine his own life, his relationship with his son, and how love can sometimes be much more complicated than it seems. This is an interesting extension of the "Harry Potter" universe, but readers should go into it knowing that it's its own beast. Rowling didn't write it (much to the fury and vitriol of many fans), and it is in script form, so it loses some of the magic that won over millions of readers back when it all began. However, many of the themes that made the original series great are still in abundance-love and friendship conquering all, facing your flaws and accepting them-so that it simultaneously still feels like a "Harry Potter" tale while remaining its own story. VERDICT It is unlikely that the script will create new Potter followers, owing to its format (reading a script vs. reading a novel is a whole other ballgame), but it's a well-crafted and enjoyable read.-Tyler Hixson, School Library Journal © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
The play's great, but do kids really want to read a play script? It seems that for Harry, they'll do anything I literally grew up with Harry Potter. When the final book came out a decade ago, we were both 17. With more than 450m books sold since Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published in 1997, JK Rowling's series transformed reading into something genuinely cool during my lifetime. By my late teens, I was such a big fan I donned a Sirius Black costume before queuing for the final instalment. But when it was announced in 2015 that Harry would return in a new story, the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and that he'd be 37, an overworked civil servant, struggling with parenting, I was dismayed. How had he gained 12 years on me? With every subsequent announcement, I got more cynical: it's five hours long? Split in two parts? The final nail in the coffin: a midnight release for the play script in book form. It was marketed as a benevolent gesture to those who could not see the play in London, but even as someone who queued for at least four Harry Potter books, it was hard to imagine kids lining up for screeds of stage directions. Should plays be read? Many would say, no -- plays are written to be performed. Many actors argue that Shakespeare's plays shouldn't be studied in schools, as he is only truly appreciated through performance. But then what of The Iliad or Beowulf, composed for recitation but plonked on the page for posterity -- would we not consider those literature? When The Cursed Child box office opened, 175,000 tickets sold out in 24 hours -- more than half of them to under-35s. At the performance I attend, the audience is mainly twentysomethings taking selfies; two guys behind me discuss the representational politics of Dumbledore's homosexuality. I'm sitting next to one of the youngest people I can see -- Maddie, 16, who tells me things like: "Did you know there are 142 staircases in Hogwarts?" -- and I am filled with a profound sense of pride in the kids these books produced. Minutes into the play, I begin to feel sorry for all the fans worldwide whose experience will be restricted to reading The Cursed Child 's script. As a book, it will be a slog: it is the equivalent of three Harry Potter novels squeezed into one, running on a Groundhog Day grasp of time travel and a Star Wars -esque handling of oedipal myth. But as a live experience, it is unique and incredible. An obsessive audience gasps at each of the reveals, cheers for the illusions, claps at the showdowns. For me, a lot of the joy comes from sitting next to Maddie, hearing her laugh, shout, cry. I can imagine that struggling through the script might be a lonely experience: something communal rendered solitary. But during the break between plays (I'm seeing both on the same day) I head to the nearby Foyles bookshop, the site of a Potter pilgrimage for 25- to 30-year-olds, and any cynicism I have for the script's midnight release evaporates in the face of the genuine excitement all around me. Many of those who have already seen the play intend to join the queue. Wide-eyed kids who had been too young for the last Potter launch. Students who make faces at the suggestion of dressing up, but mention they have swapped Sunday shifts to spend the day reading. Grey-haired adults who proudly announce they have kept their costumes for a decade -- Kingsley Shacklebolt, Luna Lovegood, a female Harry. Like me, these fans see no distinction between the characters in their heads, on Rowling's pages, and the actors on stage. This new, older Harry is still my Harry. Watching the play, I feel an irrational desire to pull him off the stage and ask where he's been for the last decade. The whole theatre is united by a longing for something too complex to define: nostalgia for afternoons spent reading, a reminder of childhoods gone by. So at midnight, no one will be lining up simply to buy a script, just as no one was in that theatre simply to see a play: they're there for Harry, in any form they can get him. The Cursed Child, either as a performance or a script, is going to make a lot of people really happy. Should you read a play? If it features Harry Potter, I'm going to. - Sian Cain.
New York Review of Books Review
A FRIEND ONCE told me about an infamous party she attended after the midnight launch of a mid-series Harry Potter book. A dozen people sat in a small Brooklyn apartment, reading newly purchased copies in silence. My friend was halfway through when the first reader closed her book and went to wait outside on the stoop until another reader, finished, emerged to talk about everything they had just read. The room emptied as the night wore on, the speediest readers exiting early, less zippy readers doggedly persevering. It was a night of three celebrations : first the midnight purchase, then the reading salon and, finally, the elated moment when you weren't the last reader to join the discussion on the stoop. I bought "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" around noon the day after it came out and the day before flying to Aberdeen, Scotland. I didn't even crack the spine on the overnight flight. I had concerns. What if it was like a high school reunion? Harry Potter and I were both older. What if I didn't recognize him? What if we no longer had anything in common? During the layover in Dublin, my 7-year-old daughter wrote and illustrated the 11th book in her own series (about a rat named Ratso). I sat down on a hard chair in the wrong time zone, opened my book and was instantly transported back (forward?) to the lives of characters I remember in better detail than I do my own childhood. What a remarkable thing! "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" is the bar e-bones script of a play. And yet, it has the same addictive drive as Rowling's novels. Of course, this isn't Rowling's writing, but rather the playwright Jack Thorne elaborating on a story conceived by Rowling, Thorne and the director John Tiffany together. And yet, Harry Potter and Hermione and Ron and Ginny - in their actions and dialogue, their preoccupations and loyalties - remain themselves. By which, since Harry and the rest are fictional characters, I mean Thorne has by some sort of alchemy written a book that I would previously have assumed only J. K. Rowling could write. The humor is Rowling's, as is the tightrope-with-an-umbrella execution of a for mid ably complicated plot and Rowling's sturdy, pragmatic morality, where the high cost of doing the right thing is nevertheless worth paying. How can a collaboration feel so singularly tethered to Rowling's point of view? There's probably a spell for this you could learn at Hogwarts if Hogwarts really existed, but the ingredients must be rare and difficult to come by. Perhaps the qualities that make Rowling such a remarkable writer are the same ones that make a project like this possible. The world of Rowling's series is so generously furnished by her redoubtable imagination; her sense of how magic could work is so practical and everyday in its details, so fanciful in its delights. Her heroes and their friendships are easy to recognize, as are the villains who make the lives of those around them as grindingly, interminably miserable as possible. We know that they will receive their comeuppance. We know her heroes will do the right thing. The patterns of genre that Rowling inhabits must be a useful limitation for anyone working in her world, although it's still a marvel how Rowlingian (please feel free to use this neologism to describe other writers I might enjoy) Jack Thorne's approach to dialogue is. (The only difference I can spot is that his villains are just a bit more perfunctory in their awfulness. Dolores Umbridge is slightly less of a pill. The Dursleys, in Harry's nightmares, seem slightly less nightmarish than they were in life. But perhaps on the stage they are just as ghastly.) So what, then, to make of the new characters, Albus Potter and Scorpius Malfoy and Rose Granger-We asley? How Rowlingian, exactly, are they? Much like Harry, Ginny, Hermione, Ron and Draco, this new generation of magical children feel like real people who want ordinary things in life (good friends, small adventures, to discover what they might be capable of) but who stumble into the extraordinary. I thought they were excellent company and that they fit in just fine at Hogwarts. Harry Potter has, from the first book onward, been a communal experience. It seems appropriate that most nights a sold-out audience will literally see this new chapter come to life. Because the original story was a series, it seems appropriate that the play stretch across two performances. Because it is about time travel and how change ripples outward, it seems right that every live performance will allow the possibility of difference from the previous. There were moments where I paused in reading to think how much funnier or scarier or spectacular something must be onstage: when Harry's son, the teenage Albus, transmogrified into the adult Ron, kisses Hermione vigorously to distract her; when Snape sends forward his Patronus; a moving, menacing hedge maze that must be navigated. But on the whole I wasn't sorry to be reading the script. The act of imagining how certain scenes or effects might be achieved has its own kind of pleasurable magic and appeal. THE APPEAL of all fantasy, including Rowling's original series, comes from answering the question "What if?" What if magic existed? What if an owl delivered an invitation (to you!) to learn magic at a secret school? What if jelly beans came in every flavor, including earwax? What if you had to die to save the world? The questions of "The Cursed Child" are the ones you can ask only after a series has been wrapped up successfully and everyone has had their just deserts. What if Voldemort had a child? What if characters who died could be restored to the people who loved and missed them? What if things went differently? What if, like Dum ble dore, Harry Potter had to choose between saving an innocent life and keeping the world safe? What if we could have a chance, one last time, to see people (characters) we loved dearly? I've noticed, to my bewilderment, the question circulating of whether J. K. Rowling should have agreed to this project. What could be the case against it? That the play could dilute the accomplishment of the original series? That Rowling's readers might revolt when asked to read a script? That characters and stories best beloved by readers no longer belong to their author? What ungenerous, anxious, proscriptive lines of thinking. Here's to a long and surprising career in which J.K. Rowling continues to move in and out of the kinds of genre and collaborative projects that interest her most. Readers are free to follow her or not. In the nine years between the publication of the seventh and eighth Harry Potter books, Rowling has written a doorstopper contemporary social novel and three books of a continuing detective series, as well as a Quidditch handbook, a handful of short stories and a wizard's bestiary due shortly to appear as a movie (the script also by Rowling). Adjacent to the books she's written, there are movies; theme parks; and Pottermore, which calls itself a "digital publishing, e-commerce, entertainment and news company." Has there been any individual since Walt Disney who has had greater influence on the creative landscape? Are there any literary characters since Sherlock Holmes and Watson as beloved as Harry and Ron and Hermione? Here's to the boy who has lived into middle age and to the writer who so vividly brought him to life. Here's to reading parties where fans of this new book can choose parts and read the script aloud together, rather than going out to sit on a stoop and wait for everyone else to finish. When I arrived in Aberdeen, my 11-year-old niece Katie was, as it turned out, half-way through "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child." So we had a reading party of our own. I stayed awake longer to finish (the advantage of traveling forward in timezone time). In the morning we agreed it was an excellent book. I said I wondered where Hagrid was, and Teddy Lupin, during the present-day scenes in the book. I was anxious about them. Katie said she was surprised when the Sorting Hat put Albus in Slytherin. I pointed out that in the first Harry Potter book, the Sorting Hat had debated whether to put Harry in Gryffindor or Slytherin, and Katie said, "Yes, but that was probably because Harry had a piece of Voldemort's soul in him." We agreed we would like to see the play. My 7-year-old picked up "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" and read the first few pages. Then she put it down again. "Aren't you going to read it?" I asked her. "No," she said, sounding scandalized. "There are owls, and they're flying in the daylight !" KELLY LINK, a co-founder of Small Beer Press, is the author of four story collections, including "Get in Trouble."
