Author: J. K. Rowling
Publisher: Scholastic Press
Copyright: 2000
ISBN: 9780439139595
Reading Level/Interest Age: Grade 4 and up
Genre: Fantasy--Magic and Wizards
Reader’s Annotation: Harry's fourth year at Hogwarts is enlivened by the Triwizard Tournament, in which he involuntarily competes as a superfluous champion.
Plot Summary
Like all of the Harry Potter books, this installment contains layer upon layer of subplots. The main events are as follows. Before school starts, Harry goes to the Quidditch World Cup with the Weasleys and Hermione. After the match, Death Eaters appear and cast the Dark Mark in the sky. Back at Hogwarts, Harry, Ron, and Hermione are excited to learn that the Triwizard Tournament will take place this year. This contest tests young witches’ and wizards’ courage, knowledge, and magical skill. Students from two other schools of magic, Beauxbatons in France and Durmstrang in Eastern Europe, arrive to enter the tournament. Though there is supposed to be only one champion per school, and there is a strict age requirement of 17, Harry’s name emerges from the magical Goblet of Fire, making him an unprecedented fourth champion. In the first of the tournament’s challenges, champions must retrieve a golden egg protected by a dragon. The Yule Ball poses another kind of challenge for Harry and Ron—getting dates. For the second task, they must rescue a loved one held captive by the merfolk at the bottom of the lake. The final challenge is a maze, with the Triwizard Cup at its center. The first champion to grasp the cup wins. But Harry and Cedric arrive at the cup together and decide to take it at the same time. They are transported to a graveyard, where a new, dark chapter in the history of the wizarding world begins.
Critical Evaluation
The Harry Potter series reaches a major turning point in this book. For one thing, it is much longer than the previous installments, coming in at well over 700 pages. More importantly, though, it is much darker than the previous books. This is where Harry Potter becomes a young adult rather than a children’s series. Goblet of Fire also begins a story arc that continues through the end of the series. Though elements from the first three books are carried on in the later ones, each contains an essentially complete story. From Book 4 on, the action doesn’t let up. As the series grows up in this book, so do the characters. Harry, Ron, and Hermione all become interested in the opposite sex and turn into moody teenagers. (Harry and Ron spend the Yule Ball sulking because the girls they wanted to take to the dance went with other boys.)
Rowling is a master storyteller. Despite the novel’s great length, she manages to see each of the disparate story lines through to the end. She leaves clues and explanations along the way so that the climax is earned, not manufactured. (For example, she introduces the port key—the magical mode of transport that takes Harry and Cedric to the graveyard—at the beginning of the book.) For the impatient reader with a little background on the series, Goblet of Fire is the place to start reading Harry Potter in earnest.
Curriculum Ties: N/A
Booktalking Ideas: Describe the Triwizard Tournament.
Challenge Issues: Violence, occult content
In the defense file, I will include my library's selection policy, ALA's Library Bill of Rights, ALA's guidelines on free access to libraries for minors (http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/interpretations/freeaccesslibraries.cfm), and ALA's strategies and tips for dealing with challenges to library materials (http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/challengeslibrarymaterials/copingwithchallenges/strategiestips/index.cfm). I will also include my library's reconsideration form, in case challenges to this book cannot be defused with "tea and sympathy." I'll put in positive reviews from School Library Journal, Booklist, Kliatt, and The Lorgnette - Heart of Texas Reviews and a mixed one from Kirkus Reviews.
About the Author
After leaving university I worked in London; my longest job was with Amnesty International, the organisation that campaigns against human rights abuses all over the world. But in 1990, my then boyfriend and I decided to move up to Manchester together. It was after a weekend's flat-hunting, when I was travelling back to London on my own on a crowded train, that the idea for Harry Potter simply fell into my head.
I had been writing almost continuously since the age of six but I had never been so excited about an idea before. To my immense frustration, I didn't have a functioning pen with me, and I was too shy to ask anybody if I could borrow one. I think, now, that this was probably a good thing, because I simply sat and thought, for four (delayed train) hours, and all the details bubbled up in my brain, and this scrawny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who didn't know he was a wizard became more and more real to me. I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them (although sometimes I do wonder, idly, how much of what I imagined on that journey I had forgotten by the time I actually got my hands on a pen).
Nine months later, desperate to get away for a while, I left for Portugal, where I had got a job teaching English in a language institute. I took with me the still-growing manuscript of Harry Potter, hopeful that my new working hours (I taught in the afternoon and evening) would lend themselves to pressing on with my novel, which had changed a lot since my mother had died. Now, Harry's feelings about his dead parents had become much deeper, much more real. In my first weeks in Portugal I wrote my favourite chapter in Philosopher's Stone, The Mirror of Erised.
I had hoped that when I returned from Portugal I would have a finished book under my arm. In fact, I had something even better: my daughter. I had met and married a Portuguese man, and although the marriage did not work out, it had given me the best thing in my life. Jessica and I arrived in Edinburgh, where my sister Di was living, just in time for Christmas 1993.
I intended to start teaching again and knew that unless I finished the book very soon, I might never finish it; I knew that full-time teaching, with all the marking and lesson planning, let alone with a small daughter to care for single-handedly, would leave me with absolutely no spare time at all. And so I set to work in a kind of frenzy, determined to finish the book and at least try and get it published. Whenever Jessica fell asleep in her pushchair I would dash to the nearest cafe and write like mad. I wrote nearly every evening. Then I had to type the whole thing out myself. Sometimes I actually hated the book, even while I loved it.
Finally it was done. I covered the first three chapters in a nice plastic folder and set them off to an agent, who returned them so fast they must have been sent back the same day they arrived. But the second agent I tried wrote back and asked to see the rest of the manuscript. It was far and away the best letter I had ever received in my life, and it was only two sentences long.
It took a year for my new agent, Christopher, to find a publisher. Lots of them turned it down. Then, finally, in August 1996, Christopher telephoned me and told me that Bloomsbury had 'made an offer.' I could not quite believe my ears. 'You mean it's going to be published?' I asked, rather stupidly. 'It's definitely going to be published?' After I had hung up, I screamed and jumped into the air; Jessica, who was sitting in her high-chair enjoying tea, looked thoroughly scared.
And you probably know what happened next.
www.jkrowling.com
Why is this title included?
The Harry Potter books are the most popular the world has ever seen. They're not likely to be forgotten any time soon. Though teens may have read the whole series as children, they may well want to reread it later. I chose to review Goblet of Fire because it is the turning point of the series (see above).