J. K. Rowling – Steve Kloves: Fantastic Beasts – The Secrets of Dumbledore (Little Brown Book 2022)
Although the book series ended in 2007 (UK edition) and the film series in 2011, the story continued. On July 30, 2016, the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child premiered, and on July 31 (Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling’s birthday), the screenplay was also published, the plot of which takes place 19 years after the Battle of Hogwarts. Also, that year, a prequel series, Fantastic Beast, was launched. The motto of the story was the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them book, which appeared in Harry Potter and were later published, but the focus of the films is not on the animals themselves, but on the author, the magizoologist Newt Scamander, and the era in which he lived.
The story takes place in the 1920s in New York and later in other parts of the world. This is when Gellert Grindelwald, who hated Muggles, came to power. In Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Harry finds Dumbledore’s card in a box of a chocolate frog, one of the sentences on the card turns out to be important in the story. Another sentence of the card, on the other hand, describes that Dumbledore became famous by defeating Grindelwald. Although we know the end of the story, the fight between the two still holds many surprises.
The author signed a contract for a total of five films, the texts of which will also be published. Until now, MinaLima Studio, responsible for the visuals of the films, designed the beautiful covers of the volumes, unfortunately not in this case, but in return we can read a lot of movie content, behind-the-scenes information and interviews. Graphic designers Eduardo Lima and Miraphora Mina are still responsible for the documents appearing in the film. I really liked that things that were barely seen in the film, such as the train tickets, were crafted in such detail as if they were the center of a scene and thus made the world of the film more real. We also find pictures of these documents in the volume.
Dumbledore and Newt Scamander still have a lot of work to do before they can take their place in the history of the wizarding world, and this means many, many more adventures for us readers.
