Yesterday I spent a good portion of the day reading Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. You might say I have a bit of a Harry Potter obsession.  I once had a man withdraw a marriage proposal after I told him that if I could only talk about one topic for the rest of my life it would be Harry Potter.  Think about it – from just one book series you can discuss magic, spirituality, religion, racism, war, peace, and unicorns (among other things)!  I don’t think the man was serious about the marriage proposal in the first place, but I was certainly serious about Harry Potter.

That’s why when I was on a date with someone else a few months later and he told me that he and a friend had planned an all-day movie marathon of the Harry Potter movies for Valentine’s Day weekend, I began to suspect that this was the man for me.  That we then spent our honeymoon having this all-day movie marathon just goes to show how serious I am about Harry Potter.

              So of course I dove right into this latest installment.  And don’t worry, I’m not going to give any spoilers away until the second to last paragraph, other than I gasped so loudly on pages 17 and 20 that my husband had to leave the room because he was going to read the book second and didn’t want to know anything about it.

Now that I’m done, I don’t know how I feel about the book.  For the record, it’s also not really a book.  It’s a play script that wasn’t actually written by JK Rowling, although it is based on an original story by her, Jack Thorne, and John Tiffany.  Part of me loves hearing any tidbits about Harry, Ron, Hermione, and the rest of the Hogwarts gang, and how their futures mapped out, but other parts of me are left feeling empty by the “book.”  I don’t know if I feel let down; perhaps the script format just didn’t work me.

Or maybe I just don’t like Harry as an adult.  There are some interesting choices that the writers make with Harry’s story.  But as Harry is not my creation, I cannot presume to know this character better than JK Rowling.  So I don’t think it’s my place to question her characterizations, although it does give me good fodder to reflect on character development and story choice in my own writing and I suppose I can be grateful about that.

**SPOILER ALERT PARAGRAPH**  I think ultimately, though, I felt the same way about Cursed Child as I did when Back to the Future II came out in theaters.  Like Cursed Child, I had been waiting for that movie for a long time (OMG, I had a super big crush on Michal J. Fox!) and I wanted it to make me love him even more.  So when the plot went everywhere and seemed to negate the very best moments of the original film, I had a hard time enjoying it.  There are some similarities with time travel in Cursed Child.  I began to worry about how everything would get wrapped up and I whether would I be able to believe in the story.   **SPOILER ALERT PARAGRAPH**

**SPOILERS OVER YOU CAN KEEP READING HERE** I suppose the fact I had such a strong reaction to the script indicates just how much the original Harry Potter stories resonate with me.  Regardless of my take home feelings, I did read the script in one day, and even though JK Rowling insists Harry’s story is now done I am confident that should she release another story I would read it with the same gusto as this one.  I think Harry Potter may be my first true love.  I’m pretty sure my husband is okay with that!