Finally ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ Goes From Stage to Page on Saturday at the Witching Hour

The largest summer book isn't a memoir or thriller blockbuster celebrity scene. It is a play about a middle-aged magician.

The publication of "Harry Potter and the cursed child," the best-selling series in the eighth installment of j. k. Rowling, who is celebrated in more than 5,000 bookstores and libraries around the country this weekend, with midnight release parties featuring costume contests, magic, wizard rock bands, live owls and butterbeer, drink of choice among the young witch.

Launch complex have all developed that fans have come to expect of the new Harry Potter book. But for many readers of nostalgia, this one feels different. "Cursed children" is not a novel, but the script play formats not normally read for pleasure and almost never produce the best seller overnight. And unlike the seven previous books in the series, it was not written by Ms. Rowling herself.

In a sense, "Cursed children" are more like fan fiction sanctions of a new work by an author fond of. Ms. Rowling is working on the drama of the plot with the playwright Jack Thorne and Director John Tiffany, and while he helped shape the story, hehas made it very clear that he did not write the script.

The idea for the play, which explores Harry's life as adults and parents, did not originate with Ms Rowling, either: he just agreed to it when the two theatrical producers proposed the concept.

Which raises the question: If Ms. Rowling sticky not pregnant play, or write it, actually "Cursed children" story of the new Harry Potter by j. k. Rowling? And if not, whether the Harry Potter fans even care?

Many, apparently, is not.

"The involvement of j. k. Rowling legitimizes it as canon, and the fact that others collaborate on it does not detract from it," says Matt Maggiacomo, Executive Director of the Harry Potter Alliance, a nonprofit group that promotes literacy and other causes.

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Melissa Anelli, author of "Harry, a history," a book about the Harry Potter phenomenon, agrees that the story with Ms. Rowling's blessing is important as a continuation of the story — a view which many fans of the Potter seems to share, based on the large number of preorders and euphoric response on social media for news that the play will be published.

"The one thing we all always wanted most from him is a book, but if we get a storyin the form of a play, so long as he says it's the real deal, we were on the ship," said p. Anelli, who is organizing a midnight release party for some 2,000 fans at the Con geeky, a festival in Orlando, Florida, which will feature a costume ball and a performance by the rock band wizard.

But fans of the Potter was skeptical, arguing that a story that did not spring from Ms. Rowling's imagination is just not the same.

"I've talked to a lot of people who aren't sure if they will treat it as canon, as j. k. Rowling did not write it," said Helen Haslam, who published a work of fiction in the Potter fan website of Wattpad. "I grew up with the books, I spent a lot of time in the world, and the idea of someone else add it a little stressful."

Some will skip it altogether. Sharanya Sharma, a primary school teacher in Washington who fell under the spell of Harry Potter when he was 9, said he was satisfied when the series ended with "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows."

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The book version of the play is getting the witching hours of release.

"I am worried that will adversely affecting my memories of what Harry Potter meant to me when I was growing up," he said. "Sometimes I go back and read Harry Potter as a nostalgic experience, and I'm not sure I want to ruin it."

Even though it's been nearly a decade since Ms. Rowling's beloved series, ending devotion among hard-core fans have never faded. While Ms. Rowling has moved to fiction writing as an adult, he continued to embellish the Potter universe, not onlywith the material at the Pottermore website, but also through public statements about the character.

The passion the fans have continued to be fed by a steady flow of blockbuster movies, theme parks, new short stories about the magical world which was released on Pottermore, and now, "cursed children," which took in with scenes from the epilogue of "Deathly Hallows," as a grown-up Harry watches his own son leaving for Hogwarts.

The play, which officially opened on Saturday in London, has generated praise from theater critics excited.