The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello and welcome to the Slate Audio Book Club for the month of August 2016.

I'm Katie Waldman, words correspondent at Slate, and I'm joined today in the D.C. studio by Slate Culture Editor Dan Cois.

Hello. How are you?

I'm good. And in New York, we're joined by the Slate writer and editor, Laura Anderson. Hey, Laura. Hi, Katie. So it's Children's Literature Month for the Slate Book Review. We've got a pop-up blog called Nightlight that will feature a different piece on that topic every single day until September. So please do check that out. And in the spirit of our blog, we are also discussing

children's literature on our podcast. Namely, we'll dig into the eighth installment in the Harry Potter

and the cursed child. Do you guys say cursed or cursed or cursed? A cursed child. No, I think it's just

cursed. Okay, it is the cursed child. A quick note that spoilers will follow.

So if you haven't read Cursed Child yet and don't want to hear about the plot, you may want to turn us off and come back when you're done.

So before we get into themes or story or even quality, there are several ways in which this book differs from the Harry Potter novels we know and love.

Dan, what are some of those ways?

Well, to start with it is not written by J.K. Rolling.

Yes.

Number one.

Big one.

Many people's radars when they pick up this book will be, they handle a very canily on the front cover.

I'm looking at your hardcover right now, which is that J.K. Rowling's name is in big letters. And then it says above that, based on an original new story by, and then down to the bottom, it says a new play by Jack Thorne. So yes, so this is, we're not written by JK Rowling. It's written by Jack Thorne. Jack Thorne is a playwright. Also, this book is a play script for the gargantuan two evening extravaganza currently being put on on the West End in London, written by Jack Thorne.

And from a story that J.K. Rowling worked up with Jack Thorne, the playwright, and John Tiffany, the director of the show.

Cool. So, Laura, what did you make of reading Harry Potter in script form?

Well, I found that, as Dan Coase wrote in his review of the book, personally, dot com.

It lacked a lot of the things that I really loved about Harry Potter, namely a lot of

description of the world, the universe itself, of Hogwarts, you know, every last moving staircase

...