Book review: Harry Potter and the cursed child

Mulan and I finished reading Harry Potter and the Cursed Child recently.

Or, more accurately, within a couple of days of getting it out of the library, Mulan had read it twice through.  I was a bit slower, and have only read it once.  I think Mulan plans to read it a third time before returning it to the library.

Obviously, we're big Harry Potter fans, and this was a Harry Potter book, so all good, right?  Well not quite.

I mean, we both still really enjoyed the book.  The story was exciting and fun, as we learnt more about the familiar characters "19 years later" and more.  The Time-Turner plot point was obviously put in so that the reader/play audience could conveniently do "back-tos" to the old, familiar Harry Potter school days times.  And it worked in that sense, even though Time-Turners inevitably create plot holes and inconsistencies.

(Yeah, I'm not going to say any more about what happens in the story.  I don't want to spoil anything for Miya, as she is only onto the third book.)

That the book was the script of a play, and not a novel, made the reading a bit different.  But that was good too -- I liked that this enabled Mulan to read a different type of writing.

To me, though, the big problem was the story writing.  It was just done badly.  One thing I always like about Rowling's writing is that she knows how to string words together to make reading a pleasure.  But in this case she apparently didn't actually write the story.  I think I am right to say she had the story idea, and then the words were written by John Tiffany and Jack Thorne.  And I don't think Tiffany and Thorne did a very good job.

I felt the writing was too simplistic.  Everything was up front and on the surface.  All the issues were (sometimes painfully) said out loud by the characters.  It was dull and dumbed down, with no subtlety or character depth.  This meant that many of the characters didn't seem like themselves -- they had turned into two-dimensional cartoon versions of themselves.  Maybe this has something to do with the necessities of writing a play as opposed to a novel.  Or, more precisely, maybe this has something to do with writing a play for a mass, pop audience.  Did they think that anything that required a bit of brain power to process would scare away the ticket-buyers?

So, yeah, it was a book that was fun for already existing Harry Potter fans.  But, objectively speaking, it was a so-so work -- if it didn't have the Harry Potter names attached to it, I probably wouldn't have bothered with it.