J.K. Rowling

The upcoming Harry Potter spinoff Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is still almost a year away, but with Star Wars: The Force Awakens almost here, everyone is scrambling to get their big trailers attached to the biggest movie of the year. Fantastic Beasts is no exception and today we get our first look at the continuation of the Wizarding World. The only problem? It’s not much of a look.

The final Harry Potter novel was full of grand battles and grander revelations, but it also featured a tiny detail that radically changed the saga’s timeline. Although J.K. Rowling’s first book in the beloved series was published in 1997 and the final book in 2007, a date on a gravestone revealed that the events of the final novel take place in 1997. That means that Harry Potter himself was born in 1980. Which means that he’s 35 in 2015. And according to Rowling herself, that makes today, September 1, 2015, the first day of school at Hogwarts for Harry’s eldest son.

And there are NO wizards! Not even one. The Casual Vacancy is set in an English town, Pagford, where a sudden death shocks the community. It turns out, Pagford is a town at war.  From Rowling's website: Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils…Pagford is not what it first seems...