The eighth Harry Potter story takes place 19 years after the Battle of Hogwarts. Harry is working for the Ministry of Magic and is father to three school-age children, the youngest of whom, Albus, is struggling with the burden of his father’s legacy. In Albus’s struggle to escape from the shadow of his famous father, past and present will collide and evil will rise.

It’s taken me a long time to gather the courage to read this book. Harry Potter was an intrinsic part of my childhood and, having recently re-read all seven books, I can safely say I love them just as much now I’m an adult. So to be handed an eighth story, a continuation of Harry’s journey, felt too good to be true. And it was.

I did not like this book. I realise that it is a script and therefore is meant to be seen on stage, and I have no doubt that actually watching it live is a far better experience than reading it, particularly with all the magical special effects described in the stage directions.

But no amount of stagecraft wizardry can change the fact that the story was poor and, what was worse, the characters were nothing like themselves.

It seemed as if Jack Thorne watched the HP films but didn’t bother to read the books to get an idea of the nuances of each of the characters. Harry is not the character we know and love from the books.

He is hollow, rude and occasionally aggressive. Ron is not a character in this story; he is pure comic relief.

He is portrayed as a bumbling idiot who runs a joke shop and whose only purpose is to lighten the mood. Read the books and Ron is brave, fiercely protective of his friends and family, and ruthless when crossed. Read this script and you will come away feeling as though he never opens his mouth except to tell a joke.

There is another character who I won’t mention by name because it’s a huge spoiler, but he too seemed to have undergone a complete character transplant.

There are no significant female characters in this book, which is all the more disappointing given that Rowling gave us Hermione, Ginny and Professor McGonagall. In this script, Hermione and Ginny are given very little to do; they exist purely for other characters to talk at and bounce their ideas off. Hermione and Ron’s daughter, Rose, is a promising character at the start, rife for some character development, but then disappears almost entirely, and we barely see Harry’s other children. (On a side note, where the hell is Teddy Lupin?!)

It’s as if Thorne is afraid to step too far from the original books. Before I read this I didn’t know what the story was about but I expected something new. It starts off promisingly enough, before more and more characters and storylines from the original books are brought in. Thorne leans heavily on the crutch of past characters and storylines, afraid to branch out and try something new.

There are so many plot holes that contradict the meticulously crafted world Rowling created, and I can’t believe she let this story out there. There is a twist in Part Two that is completely implausible and so utterly ridiculous I don’t think I’ll ever recover from the shock. It destroys everything we have come to believe about several of her characters. The plot descends into nonsensical chaos that is quickly resolved due to time constraints and tied up into a neat little bow.

The scenes are all very short and chop and change very quickly, leaving no space for character development or proper discussion of what the hell is going on in the plot. The characters are so flat that you can immediately tell who is a hero and who is a villain, which destroys any suspense there might otherwise have been.

I would still love to see this play live as I’m sure it would look fantastic on stage. But that will not change the fact that I did not enjoy the story. I did not enjoy what Thorne did with these characters. It pains me to be negative about anything to do with Harry Potter, but I just can’t say I enjoyed this story. Out of all the infinite options Rowling’s world offered, I will never understand why they chose this one.