A NOTE ON THE SPOILERS
A while ago I got a comment tantrum from a semiliterate rando because apparently some people are too stupid to understand a SPOILER WARNING, so I thought I’d elaborate on my exact definition of a spoiler. I AM GOING TO SUMMARIZE THE ENTIRE BOOK, INCLUDING THE ENDING. Think of me as a very niche Wikipedia. If you have a problem with that, you are welcome to stop reading at any time. I don’t make money from this content. I don’t care how many people read it.
This is your legacy, Fedup: an extra line on an obscure book blog that probably doesn’t even have ten followers. It’s not exactly a Nobel prize, but it’s still quite a nifty little achievement. Your parents must be so proud. Please seek help.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
J.K. Rowling
NOTE 1: J.K. Rowling is a virulently hateful person, and she has made that inescapably clear over the last several years. This review series is solely about my thoughts on the Harry Potter books and will not go into her unapologetic transphobia, though I will make a note of it if and when it pops up in the books. Nevertheless, it would’ve been strange to embark upon a Harry Potter review without mentioning the author herself.
NOTE 2: I’m assuming you’re going to be able to follow the names and vocabulary. Google it if you can’t. There’s way too much background detail for me to explain in one review, or even seven.
You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers for pretty much the entire series. Other reviews in this series can be found here. Increasingly feral Kindle notes are saved here.
“There must be something,” Hermione muttered … “They’d never have set a task that was undoable.”
“They have,” said Ron. “Harry, just go down to the lake tomorrow, right, stick your head in, yell at the merpeople to give back whatever they’ve nicked, and see if they chuck it out. Best you can do, mate.”
Okay, sometimes I don’t give Ron enough credit. That was actually a solid plan. :’D Also: I am astonished that Hermione, with all her reading, never ran across any mention of either the Bubble-Head Charm or gillyweed, and I find that more than slightly improbable. On the other hand, that’s not the biggest eyebrow-raiser in a book packed with eyebrow-raisers, so it’s not really on my star-docking radar. We continue. (Also my last three Harry Potter summaries have got slightly out of hand and to be frank I’m a little tired of writing them, so we’re going to try to scale back on this one because about a gajillion things happen in the space of 752 pages – or 301 if you use the unbelievably stupid Kindle page numbers, which I wouldn’t – and there’s no way I’m fitting them into one summary.)
Fresh off the dramatic rescue of his estranged godfather, with the third of seven very difficult years firmly under his belt, Harry Potter returns to Hogwarts after a summer that was dreadful, magical, and terrifying by turns: dreadful because he spent the first 2/3 of it with the horrible Dursleys; magical because his found family, the Weasleys, took him to the 1994 Quidditch World Cup, in which Ireland triumphed but Bulgarian Seeker Viktor Krum caught the Snitch (to absolutely everybody’s shock, except the Weasley twins, who bet their entire life savings on precisely that outcome); terrifying because a group of Voldemort’s closeted supporters, formerly known as Death Eaters, attacked a family of Muggles in a fit of high spirits but then fled when a person unknown fired the Dark Mark (Voldemort’s logo) into the sky. Harry’s wand was later found to have cast the Dark Mark, as it had been stolen from him during the match, but blame ultimately fell on Winky, a house-elf belonging to Bartemius “Barty” Crouch, Head of the Department of International Magical Cooperation. Though Winky was very clearly not capable of any sort of Dark magic at all, Crouch fired her on the spot, seemingly deaf to all pleas in her favor. Mr. Weasley’s presence at and involvement with the general incident was blown into a scandal of exaggerated proportions by Rita Skeeter, a deeply unethical reporter who uses wizard AI to write all her articles, and all in all Harry, Ron, and Hermione have had a lot to think about over the last month. An additional worry: Harry recently woke up from a creepy dream involving the murder of an elderly Muggle named Frank Bryce, carried out by Voldemort and Peter Pettigrew (referred to hereafter as “Wormtail”), and found that his scar was hurting.
This would be a great time for an actually normal school year, but the gods are rarely so obliging, as Dumbledore surprises the school with the revival of the 200-years-dead Triwizard Tournament. This started as a nominally friendly competition between the three biggest European schools of magic – Hogwarts, Beauxbatons Academy of Magic, and Durmstrang Institute, each represented by a single champion – but was discontinued when the death toll rose to unignorable proportions. Nevertheless, Dumbledore has been working with Madame Olympe Maxime of Beauxbatons and Igor Karkaroff of Durmstrang to reinstate the Tournament, which is now considered safe enough to keep the schools’ respective champions from facing mortal peril. Among other things, the Tournament now requires that prospective champions be at least seventeen years of age, but this rather crucial rule is smashed to pieces when Harry is unexpectedly selected as Hogwarts champion alongside Cedric Diggory of Hufflepuff. Despite some debate over whether the fourteen-year-old Harry should be allowed to compete at all, Barty Crouch – one of the biggest participants in the revival of the Tournament – rules that every champion is automatically entered into a binding and unbreakable magical contract. There’s no explanation of this contract, nor the consequences of breaking it, but everyone just goes with it. Thus, Harry finds himself thrown head first into the tournament from hell, competing against Cedric, Fleur Delacour from Beauxbatons, and Viktor Krum from Durmstrang. The rest of the school turns against him overnight, believing he cheated his way into the Tournament for an extra bit of fame, and Ron abandons him completely, leaving him with Hermione as his only real friend.
Despite the contempt of his classmates, Harry perseveres with susbstantial help from Hermione and some more quiet guidance from Alastor “Mad-Eye” Moody, a retired Auror who agreed to teach DADA for a year as a favor to Dumbledore. He also receives constant offers of help from Ludovic “Ludo” Bagman, the Tournament host, though he is uncomfortable with these and refuses Bagman at every turn. As the Tournament progresses, Harry fights a dragon and makes up with Ron, who finally realizes that Harry could actually die in the Tournament; swims to the bottom of the lake to rescue Ron from merpeople, but ends up returning far outside the time limit when he refuses to abandon the merpeople’s other captives; and, possibly worst of all, is forced to ask out a girl for the traditional Yule Ball. He also learns that Dobby and Winky have been employed at Hogwarts for some time and manages to connect with Sirius, who is deeply concerned about the implications of Harry’s participation in the Tournament, but a wedge is driven into his small world when Ron grows jealous over Hermione’s relationship with Viktor Krum, who asks her out to the Yule Ball. While Harry deals with both his friends and the Tournament, Hagrid forces his students to take care of the extremely illegal and highly dangerous Blast-Ended Skrewts he bred in his backyard; Hermione, outraged over Crouch’s treatment of Winky, launches the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare (S.P.E.W.) with the goal of freeing and educating every house-elf against their will; and Rita Skeeter spends the year secretly buzzing around campus, ferreting out nasty stories for her own profit. In the course of her work, she outs Hagrid as a half-giant, leading to his receiving a pile of hate mail, and paints Hermione as a fame-chasing tramp, with the same result.
Finally Harry makes it to the third and final task of the Tournament, in which he offers to tie with Cedric for the Triwizard Cup, only to learn too late that the Cup is a Portkey that takes them both to the graveyard in which Voldemort’s father was buried. Upon arrival, Cedric is killed by Wormtail, while Harry is captured and forced to help Voldemort regain his body. After summoning his surviving Death Eaters to his side, the restored Voldemort immediately sets out to prove his strength by challenging the teenaged Harry to a duel; however, their wands were both made with a feather from the tail of Dumbledore’s pet phoenix, and they produce a rare magical effect called Priori Incantatem, in which Voldemort’s wand is forced to regurgitate the last several spells it performed. This puts Harry face to face with ghostly replicas of his parents, along with Cedric, Frank Bryce, and Bertha Jorkins, a Ministry witch who has been missing for a year. The ghosts distract Voldemort long enough to help Harry escape, and he returns to Hogwarts with Cedric’s body and the news that Voldemort has returned. In the uproar that follows, Mad-Eye Moody sneaks Harry away from the crowd and reveals himself as a particularly fanatical Death Eater who has been impersonating the real Moody for a year. The original goal was to get Harry through the Tournament and deliver him to Voldemort via Portkey, but, with Voldemort having failed to kill Harry for the fourth time, the fake Moody now intends to kill Harry for him. (Not sure how well that would go over, but you know best, bud.)
Anyway, the fake Moody is interrupted by the arrival of Dumbledore, McGonagall, and Snape, and is revealed to be Barty Crouch Jr., who escaped from Azkaban several years ago with his father’s reluctant help. After giving his confession under the influence of the truth potion Veritaserum, Crouch Jr. expresses joy at Voldemort’s return but doesn’t live long enough to enjoy it, as his soul is shortly extracted by a Dementor, leaving him worse than dead. Dumbledore attempts to explain the truth to Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge, who brought the Dementor to the school in the first place, but Fudge angrily refuses to believe that Voldemort is back despite some pretty compelling evidence, and leaves after unceremoniously giving Harry his Triwizard winnings. With Fudge determined to bury his head in the sand, Dumbledore begins to take steps against Voldemort, beginning with the missions he assigns to Snape and Sirius, and Hagrid and Madame Maxime. At the very end of the term, Cedric is honored at the leaving feast, and Dumbledore tells the student body – and their foreign guests – that Cedric was murdered by Voldemort, and urges them to stand together in the face of the chaos and terror Voldemort is about to sow.
The one bright spot in all of this is Hermione’s capture of Rita Skeeter, an unregistered Animagus who turns into a beetle. Having caught Rita on the windowsill of the Hogwarts hospital wing, Hermione has been keeping her alive in a jar for the last couple of weeks (good lord, she’s terrifying) and has promised to release her at King’s Cross, with the understanding that Rita will not be allowed to write anything for a year if she doesn’t want to get reported to the Ministry. Additionally, Ron manages to get over his Krum-induced jealousy long enough to ask for an autograph; and Harry, upon learning that Fred and George have spent the last year trying and failing to get their life savings back from Ludo Bagman (who lost a bet to them at the Quidditch World Cup), secretly gives them his Triwizard winnings as an investment in the joke shop they have been working to launch. As for Bagman, he turns out to be a lousy gambler who bet everything on Harry’s victory during the Tournament but was forced to flee his debt-collectors when Harry tied with Cedric. He is now on the run and his whereabouts are unknown, so at least Harry’s not alone in his moderately unhappy ending.
First things first: the writing is awful. Ellipses are Rowling’s new best friend…it gets particularly bad during the fight with the Hungarian Horntail…I see what she means when she says she hates writing action scenes…it reaaaaaaally shows. There is no stronger bond than the one between Rowling and her ellipses and the adverbs she so loves to repeat quietly, roughly, angrily, sarcastically, shortly, loudly, softly, hotly, coldly, smoothly, silkily, calmly, irritably, flatly, loftily, gruffly, savagely, quietly, quietly, QUIETLY. Rowling is not a particularly skillful writer and never has been, but generally writing should improve with experience, only the Harry Potter series goes in the opposite direction and I don’t even know how that’s possible. My only theory is that deadlines got shorter when the series hit it big, so maybe there wasn’t time to write well; or perhaps it’s just that the books reached the level of popularity that discouraged any in-depth editing. To which I say, RE-NORMALIZE THE EDITING PROCESS. Popularity is not a measure of skill, and it should never be used to excuse bad habits, or to elevate a creator to the level of a god. No one should be untouchable.
Terrible prose aside, this book is also unforgivably long. I do not remember struggling to finish it in middle school, when it was first published, but then those were the days when my whole family eagerly anticipated each new book, so it may simply have been the novelty of it. I was also on a deadline in middle school: we had one copy for a family of five, and four of us desperately wanted to read it. With my last two rereads, however – back in 2019 and then again this year – it took me two months to slog through the book, though it is not challenging in any sense of the word, and I don’t know why. I’m sure part of it is the length; part of it is also the length of the chapters, which each cover quite a bit of ground. But also so much happens in this book that it felt like I was going nowhere with each reading session, not when there was so much material left to get through, and it kind of killed my motivation even though I already knew everything that was going to happen. This is a personal problem and not really the fault of either the author or the book, but it would have been nice to maybe cut a few things. I would’ve been completely okay with cutting the birth of the absolutely awful romance between Ron and Hermione, though Harry Potter and the Cursed Child seems to think that Hermione will turn into a vicious, spiteful female Snape if she doesn’t marry Won-Won.
I realize the romance with Viktor Krum was only included for the sake of sparking Ron’s jealousy, but I have to ask: would it really have been so awful if Hermione had stayed in a relationship with Krum, or even if she had ended up marrying him? We don’t see much of their relationship, but he seems pretty besotted with her. As far as I can tell he’s always nice to her and he treats her well and he seems to make her happy, which is more than we can sometimes say for her official friends. Harry and Ron have been BFFs since the beginning and they always will be, and I’m happy for them, but not when they start ganging up on Hermione, who is a far better friend to them than they are to her. They’ll do anything for each other, but they seem indifferent to Hermione’s presence at the best of times. To be honest, I’m not really sure what she gets out of this friendship when they have nothing to offer her, not even some simple empathy when she’s going through the hardest year of her academic career. Where were they, exactly, when she was Time-Turnering her way into severe burnout? They were shunning her because of a rat and a broomstick. Meanwhile, where is Hermione when the boys are struggling? She’s right by their side, doing the bulk of their side research, tutoring them even when they’re nasty to her, and sometimes finishing their homework for them. And yet it never occurs to them that she has wants and needs of her own, or that she might have a life outside of them. Ron’s literal first reaction to her Yule Ball date is amused disbelief; the second is anger and gaslighting. From the bottom of my heart, I do not know what anybody sees in him.
I don’t expect the boys to do Hermione’s homework for her, and she would rather burn herself at the stake than let them ruin her grades. But I would like to know that they have her back at all times, not just the times some shitty Slytherin kid calls her a Mudblood, and they just don’t. They don’t try to comfort her when she receives a pile of hate mail over Rita Skeeter’s article. They don’t even offer to accompany her to the hospital wing when she receives an envelope full of bubotuber pus from an angry Witch Weekly reader (who should be in prison, but that’s an issue for another day). The most comfort Harry ever offers her comes in Half-Blood Prince, when he actually sides with her against Ron for once. The disparities in their friendship would be easier to swallow if Hermione had other friends, but she doesn’t. A handful of casual friendships with other Gryffindor kids doesn’t count when she is never seen hanging out with anyone other than Harry and Ron, and especially when she becomes so completely isolated every time they stop speaking to her. And after everything she does for them, after all the notes she lets them copy and the homework and extracurricular research she does on their behalf, after all the girl-related advice and the therapy and the loyalty and the love that she gives them, it’s still not enough to keep them from shutting her down and punishing her with ostracization every time she says something they don’t like. At the end of the day, it feels like she wants to be friends with them more than they want to be friends with her, and it sucks. We can’t even give Harry credit for saving her life multiple times, because Harry is generally the reason she’s in danger in the first place. She is also frequently at odds with her female classmates, who are mostly portrayed as silly and shallow, when they’re not completely unlikable; she has no close female friends; and she never has a real conversation with another woman, which is giving me some pretty serious internalized misogyny vibes on Rowling’s part.
Speaking of internalized misogyny, I have a bone to pick with Molly Weasley as well, because what in the name of Merlin’s baggy Y-fronts was she thinking when she summarily decided to punish Hermione for the things Rita wrote in Witch Weekly. This is another instance of the boys being shitty friends to Hermione because you’d think they would’ve thought to share some of their Easter toffee with her, but it mostly falls back on Mrs. Weasley, who is old enough to know better and certainly knows enough about Rita to be skeptical of anything she writes. She says as much to Amos Diggory when he tries to attack Harry over another Rita article, what is wrong with these people??? Is it just normal in the wizarding world to attack children over journalistic hit pieces? Even if Mrs. Weasley has a bit of a blind spot when it comes to Harry, even if she loves him like a son and is ferociously protective of him – qualities, incidentally, that I normally love – she should be ashamed of her behavior towards Hermione, especially when she herself says that Rita goes out of her way to make trouble. But here again Hermione is the expendable friend, and I guess it just never occurred to Mrs. Weasley to give her the benefit of the doubt even though the Hermione described in Rita’s article is significantly different from the Hermione who has stayed in Mrs. Weasley’s house and eaten at her table.
As for the rest of the book, it’s fine, I guess, though again I think it’s too long and it wouldn’t have suffered if we’d cut out the Blast-Ended Skrewts. I cannot overstate this: Hagrid is an acknowledged expert in his field and I don’t dispute his knowledge of magical creatures, but he is not remotely qualified to teach because he refuses to follow any sort of curriculum and has literally been making shit up as he goes. Forcing the kids to take care of his unspeakably stupid personal project isn’t cute, and it isn’t even particularly funny, not when his oafishness and incompetence as a teacher are used as a running joke. Professor Grubbly-Plank is quite possibly the only reason any of the kids pass their Care of Magical Creatures O.W.L., because she takes over the class long enough to teach them things that are actually on the exam. Hagrid, meanwhile, teaches the kids about hippogriffs on his first day, then spends the rest of that year teaching them about flobberworms after Malfoy gets himself mauled by Buckbeak. The Blast-Ended Skrewts make up the entire syllabus in his second year, aside from a couple of brief units on unicorns and nifflers. Why the fuck isn’t Dumbledore intervening when these creatures are both illegal and highly likely to kill a student? He’ll step in when Dolores Umbridge starts shaking one of his students, but he won’t lift so much as an eyebrow when Hagrid forces an entire class to take exploding scorpions out for a walk? What is wrong with this school?
This is the point in the series where the cracks are starting to show and I knew it would be, and to be honest I hate it. I would have loved to have kept my shining memories of this series, back when all I wanted was to know what happened next. But now I know what happens in the next book and the next and the next, and some of it isn’t settling as smoothly as it used to. To a certain extent this is inevitable; it is also profoundly irritating. Long story short, there are times I wish I could shut my adulthood in a box and just take these books as I used to take them, as a magical story to be enjoyed. It would certainly save me a lot of headaches.
