Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Harry Potter, #4)

by J.K. Rowling

[Whitney @ First Impressions Reviews]

Harry enters his fourth year at wizarding school with Voldemort's power growing stronger and his return begins to seem more likely. Despite this Hogwarts is hosting the Tri-Wizard tournament and Harry's name mysteriously is entered into the running and after being chosen as a participate is forced to compete risking not only his but other teammate's lives in the process.


J.K. Rowling continues to draw toward two major themes, love and prejudice. Love, through Harry with those surrounding him with a strong desire to protect him. His mother giving her life to save him, Dumbledore through the stupidity of blind love consistently finds excuses to avoid telling him the true reason why Voldemort attacked thirteen years ago to spare him more pain to endure. A second being prejudice, the wizarding world has a myriad of races in the community and it appears that in every book Rowling chooses a new race to "pick on". In Goblet of Fire the choice is house elves, implying that they are slaves with one free elf, Dobby who was freed several years ago and while loving his new found freedom is finding it hard to make the transition. Strangely enough, I was also reminded of Susan B. Anthony or the Woman's Right movement, maybe it was Hermione's organization S.P.E.W. {Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare}. Lastly, and I believe this is more apparent in the movies due to the costumes but the Death Eaters, Voldemort's supporters have an uncanny resemblance to the KKK from the described garb to the groups torture and discrimination on certain races/species.


This is my favorite of the series probably because it is the climax of all seven books. The Goblet of Fire is kind of like Gone with the Wind, the first half of the book/movie shows the thriving comfortable land of the south, and in the second part war strikes demolishing everything they knew. I feel that this installment has similar features, the wizarding world working hard to maintain a peaceful secret life for the past thirteen years only to begin to crumble at Voldemort's return.