Introducing The Goblet of Fire
<h4 style="text-align: center;">&#8220;Come seek us where our voices sound,</h4>
<h4 style="text-align: center;">We cannot sing above the ground.&#8221;</h4>
Although Book Four of the Harry Potter series opens in the remote, and rather provincial fictional English town of Little Hangleton, the story will prove to be the first truly global novel in the wizarding saga, exemplified by two massive magical events: the finals of The Quidditch World Cup, which takes place in late summer, right before the academic year at Hogwarts (Harry&#8217;s fourth) is set to begin, and the renewal (after several centuries) of the storied Triwizard Tournament, which brings Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry together with two other major wizarding schools in Europe, Beauxbatons and Durmstrang.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire marks a definitivee inflection point in the series in several important ways. Not only is it the nominal halway point in Harry&#8217;s (and his friends, Ron and Hermione&#8217;s) formal wizarding education, it also initiates a hard pivot towards a much darker kind of danger present in the narrative, as Lord Voldemort (He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named) regroups in the shadows, regaining strength with a new strategy. This lethal edge will be firmly in place for every new episode of Harry&#8217;s story that is to follow.
Curiously, it also constitutes the longest installment of the series up to this point. Released in the year 2000, one imagines an entire generation of young, avid readers, maturing (like Harry and his classmates) with each passing year. The fact that author, J.K. Rowling has settled into such an ambitious and epic-scale narrative with an enormous cast of returning characters, and many layers of subplot that both integrate with, and bolster, the main thrust of the tale, all this truly becomes clear and palpable in The Goblet of Fire, as Rowling puts on a rather grand feast with a heightened intensity that befits Harry&#8217;s age (he&#8217;s fourteen now) and honors not only the turbulent teenage years, but his definitive steps toward maturity and awakening, both as a young man, and a powerful wizard, and as the inheritor of a unique destiny, whose depths and dimensions are, with the fourth book, only beginning to take shape.
We return to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire for real humor, real danger, and for the increasingly broad canvas on which J.K. Rowling is painting her masterpiece, the Harry Potter series. With this book, she cements the truly monumental scale of her project and enhances what was a spirited and charming tale of an orphaned wizard into an epic saga of good versus evil, with all the attendant complexity and nuance that should befit our protagonist&#8217;s age.
Happy Reading!
-Allen Guy Wilcox
#RememberCedricDiggory