Reviews Roll In For CURSED CHILD
After midnight release parties and a bit of flashback nostalgia for readers now all grown up, the reviews for the newest take on the wizarding world of Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (Scholastic/Arthur A. Levine), are flooding in.
While the play itself is a hit in London, the BBC reports in a round up of reviews of the book that “critics complained reading the script was an ‘incomplete experience’ as the story ‘demands to be seen’ [and that it was] ‘lacking the richness that acting and staging would add.'”
One review that arrived after that roundup, from the often critical Michiko Kakutani in the daily NYT‘, disagrees, calling it “absorbing and ingenious” and saying “even though it lacks the play’s much-talked-about special effects, it turns out to be a compelling, stay-up-all-night read.”
Finding the story well crafted (“the suspense here is electric and nonstop, and it has been cleverly constructed around developments recalling events in the original Potter novels”) Kakutani continues that author Jack Thorne “has a visceral understanding of the dynamics and themes at work in those novels … a dynamic, many readers can appreciate, with a particular resonance today.”
People acknowledges that “Reading 300 pages of dialogue is not the same immersive experience as settling into one of Rowling’s massive tomes, but for fans of the series? It’s a must. ”
USA Today says the print book is “almost ‘Harry Potter’ enough” adding, “reading the script (three out of four stars) is an incomplete experience — noticeably lacking the richness that acting and staging would add to a realized production and the familiar Rowling prose a novel would have contained — it may capture just enough of the old Potter magic to please even the most skeptical of fans.”