Harry Potter and the Cursed Child | A Review of the Play

THIS IS A SPOILER-FREE REVIEW

---

So… I FINALLY SAW HARRY POTTER AND THE CURSED CHILD! I know, I know, I feel like I’m the last person in Melbourne to see it. But I also know I’m super lucky to even have had this chance! We Aussies sure have been privileged recently with all the plays and musicals coming to our city (we’re still waiting on Hamilton, but come on, any day now there should be an announcement), but despite The Cursed Child having been in my sweet home town for like eight months already, I only just got around to getting my tickets. And BOY was it worth the wait!

The main reason why I waited so long to get around to seeing it was because the tickets are just SO. DAMN. EXPENSIVE. And I’m too stubborn to wait in a virtual queue on the ticket’s first release day, so I just always had it on my “oh yeah, I’ll do it later” list. But after entering the Friday Forty (a lottery whereby you can enter each week for the chance to see The Cursed Child for the reduced price of $40 per part) every single week since it started, I still hadn’t been lucky enough to score myself some tickets. So I bought some candles, went to an abandoned mansion by the ocean, and sold my soul to the devil to get enough money to buy some tickets of my own.

Processed with VSCO with c1 preset

Processed with VSCO with c1 preset

The Importance of #LoveOzYA

HELLO EVERYONE. I’m very, very excited at the moment because I have SO MANY EXCITING THINGS TO SHARE. As you might know, I co-host a book club that’s based in Melbourne called The YA Room and we’re celebrating all things #LoveOzYA this month. We have a #LoveOzYA Bingo Challenge, we’re posting on our blog and various social media channels every day, and we’re also hosting a picnic. There’s so much going on this month!

We wanted to celebrate everything #LoveOzYA this month over at The YA Room because it only seemed fair to spread love for the community that made us who we are today. We wouldn’t exist without the amazing, supportive #LoveOzYA community. Alex and I would’t have even met if it weren’t for the book launches we both attended last year, and this book club would probably just consist of me and my cat if we didn’t have such a vibrant bookish community in Melbourne. So we want to celebrate that.

If you’re not following us on all our platforms, please do so! We don’t want you to miss out on all this goodness. And check out this post for more information about the bingo challenge!

Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

Why Do You Read YA?

Let me ask you a question. Why do you read YA? Do you read it to escape the reality of the world around us and to experience new worlds and things that wouldn’t normally be possible? Do you read it to empathise with other people and to learn more about our own world? Or maybe a bit of both? While it’s definitely enjoyable to fall into a whole new world and turn off society for a bit, it’s important to remember the power of novels that show us the grittier side of the world we’re living in. Not only do these types of novels allow us to experience different aspects of the world that we might not have exposure to, they help us to form empathy towards others. Books can help us widen our views, but we need to be reading genuine and realistic novels that allow us to do that.

One novel I read recently that provided a raw and gritty insight into the reality of modern Australian suburb life was called Living on Hope Street. It was a powerful novel that revolved around a number of residents who were all struggling in their own ways, and seeing the different worlds these people lived in is something that really hit hard. In many ways, specifically because of the subject matter and the Melbourne setting, this novel was evocative of Mr Romanov’s Garden in the Sky, which was another raw and powerful book that gives insight into the way some people are living and the hardships they’re experiencing in our own neighbourhoods.