Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

In which...

We launch into new territory, not just for kids. Book 4 is the turning point in the series.

I got suckered into rereading HP/Goblet of Fire when my friend Emily posted a facebook status saying she'd read the first chapter and thought it the best opening of a Harry Potter book yet.

And it is!

It's called "The Riddle House," and it is scary and serious and wonderfully absent of the recap exposition - of the "...for Harry Potter was no ordinary boy..." variety - the reader endures at the beginnings of the earlier Potter books. (The recaps do come, in the next chapter, but starting with this book they get more and more subtle until they disappear entirely in Book 7, at which point it's on.)

The book is structured differently, with the three tasks of the Triwizard Tournament forming the skeleton and taking focus from the standard school year frame. So no Quidditch, no final exams (at least for Harry), no House Cup. In the context of the entire series, this change up makes sense; for the two years following Year 4 at Hogwarts, the calendar goes back to normal, but nothing is really the same as before. Again, Book 7 breaks the form completely by not taking place at Hogwarts at all (until it does, of course).

Has anyone not read these books? I don't know how to write about them.

The standard run down:

In HP/Goblet of Fire, Harry finds himself the unprecedented fourth champion in the famous Triwizard Tournament. No one knows how Harry's name was selected by the Goblet of Fire - his young age should, by all things decent and magical, have rendered this impossible. He is unqualified for the highly advanced and dangerous tasks ahead of him, but is now bound by magical contract to compete. So who put Harry's name in the goblet...and why?

Maybe that's a little too Dan Brown. But you get the idea. The tournament tasks happen three times over the course of Harry's fourth year, and he gets through by the skin of his teeth and with some help from some friends...or are they?

Okay, sorry again. No more ellipses or italics.

Highlights:

• The Quidditch World Cup
  
• Introduction of The Unforgivable Curses
• Teenage angst/blatant advancement of the Ron + Hermione plotline
• Professor McGonagall (you will laugh)
  
• Viktor Krum
• Use of an Unforgivable Curse on a known character. Out of the blue. Really. Shocking.
  
• Priori Incantatem (you will cry)
  
• "The Parting of Ways" and "The Beginning": final two chapters, introduction of shades of Bush/Blair-era questions and conflicts (who cares what Rowling says - I read what I read) that continue to crop up till the end of the series.

The thing I remember most from this book:

Now anything can happen, and will. The chapters in the graveyard near the end of the book are way way beyond anything we've read before. The offhanded, perfunctory killing of Blankitty Blank (again: who has not read these?!) is so shocking that the series changes from that moment on. The events that follow - the revelation of the Death Eaters, the rebirth of Voldemort, the escape of Harry, the reaction of Hogwarts and the Ministry - seem like real, traumatic, momentous life.