“After all this time?”

Yes: nine years after the epic ending of the saga with the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in 2007, the wizarding world is not completely closed and the fandom couldn’t be happier to find out how the trio and their sons have grown. If only the story was entirely created by J.K. Rowling.

The idea of resuming the plot exactly when we first met Albus, James, Lily, Rose and Hugo, is not that bad and no fan can hide a tear while reading Ginny saying “All you have to do is walk straight at the wall between platforms nine and ten”, repeating the words her mother said to a frightened young Harry.

However as soon as we continue the story, we can’t avoid thinking that there’s something wrong. We were aware its narrative style would be different, as it’s no more a novel but a play, but we still feel a sense of uneasiness that we can’t explain at the beginning.

Suddenly the explanation comes out: J.K. Rowling did not write the story, she only supervised it. And how can someone else (John Tiffany and Jack Thorne in this case) write about an entire, complicated, very well detailed and magical world (world, not a simple story) that Rowling’s mind had created?

This is the reason why even though the new characters might potentially seem true, all the old ones are completely different and there’s nothing more frustrating for a fan than thinking “Harry wouldn’t do this” all the time.

Even the motive that pushes the characters toward the action is a feeble attempt of the author to invent a dangerous storyline: he should have remembered that every time that Harry went into dangerous missions, it’s always been for a strong, necessary reason: saving the Sorcerer’s Stone from Voldemort, saving Ginny from the basilisk, saving Sirius from Voldemort and hunting down the Horcruxes.

Even the desperate attempt to make it all interesting with the time travels doesn’t have a real consistency since Rowling herself, in a story she published on the website Pottermore, wrote that “all attempts to travel back further than a few hours have resulted in catastrophic harm to the witch or wizard involved”.

This is what happens when an outsider dares to put his hand and pen in a world he hasn’t completely explored or even understood.