John Pattison

“Maps are a way of organizing wonder.” -- Peer Steinhart, “Names on a Map”

When my oldest daughter was seven years old, she asked, “Dad, are we a Harry Potter family or a Star Wars family?” I replied, “I don’t think we have to choose...but we’re probably a Harry Potter family.” My wife and I have long loved J.K. Rowling’s series about The Boy Who Lived. Just this month we finished reading DEATHLY HALLOWS with that same daughter, now nine years old, who has come to love Harry Potter as much as we do. I tried keeping my expectations in check for THE CURSED CHILD -- the eighth book (actually the script of a play), which takes place nearly two decades after "The Battle of Hogwarts” depicted in DEATHLY HALLOWS -- but I was still really looking forward to it. 

What a disappointment. 

I don’t regret reading it, but only barely. The basic premise is interesting -- What would it be like to grow up as the youngest son of the most famous wizard in the world? -- but that question is explored only shallowly and through a convoluted and tedious plot that threatens to undermine what you most enjoyed about books four through seven. It didn’t take long for me to figure out why my daughter, who read THE CURSED CHILD before me, came out of her room one evening frustrated with the book almost to the point of tears.

Because J.K. Rowling helped conceive of the story, I have to assume that she considers THE CURSED CHILD to be “canon.” I, for one, will do my best to forget it exists. Perhaps a spell will help:

“One feels that for the Shaker craftsmen, love of God and love of truth in one’s own work came to the same thing, and that work itself was a prayer, a communion with the inmost spiritual reality of things and so with God...” 

Why Mary Oliver is such good company...

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Let me keep my distance, always, from those    who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say    “Look!” and laugh in astonishment,    and bow their heads.