About book Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire (2002)
I'm a Harry Potter fan. A rather hardcore one, back in the day. The Harry fans at the big meetup of 2007 (last book) ditched me for not being cool enough. Shows what they know.I don't know if anyone on goodreads followed the intense Harry Potter fanbase core in the good old days. I wasn't on goodreads until after the last book came out. Goblet of Fire was the last Harry Potter book before all of the bitching naysayers. It was never as much fun after that, either to discuss theories or pick apart clues. It was also the book that started the "I hate Ron!" club (the Draco Malfoy is a conflicted hero idea started around the Chamber of Secrets film. Hey, I could be a Harry Potter scholar). It was pretty much like looking up any movie on the imdb or a tv show on Television Without Pity. No one hates something more than an obsessive fan, right? Fanfic writers who actually preferred their interpretations more than the original source (crazy!). The fanbase could be deterimental to nuturing ones own "ohmigod I'm going to die without the next book" that I so desperately needed. Harry Potter was my "something to look forward to". I haven't found anything else to take its place. I've not tried to hang around the fringes of a big fan base again, either. (My random goodreads tastes probably don't count. I have no idea what the big thing is. I liked The Hunger Games for the cozy district twelve parts and didn't give a rationed fig for love triangles or political outcome. I'm a loner bookworm freak!) Almost as bad were all of the people who felt some pressing need to inform me that they were too cool to even try to read Harry Potter, as if it made one bit of difference to me. [I suspect that I was expected to backtrack. You know, the way a person will immediately downplay how much they liked or disliked something based on what someone else says about it.] I was going to read it with or without them. They were not beating me by being too cool for school (especially if that school is Hogwarts!). Why were they too cool for Harry after Goblet of Fire? The fans, I mean.I don't remember an awful lot about plot points (I'm older now and my memory wasn't that good to begin with). There is some overlap between books, for sure. I do remember savoring the details and not because it would help me figure out was going to happen. I WANTED surprises. Harry disliking Ron for the bit of skin showing between his ankles and his pajama ends? That would totally have swayed me to be unwilling to hear an apology and nurse the annoyance another few days. I loved it when the whole school hated Harry (which is about all of the time). I loved how he didn't study and had to work up to the last minute nerve for everything. Those kinds of details made it for me. I remember the wait between the books and being excited to find out what Neville was up to over the summer (long live Neville Longbottom!). But no, the base was miffed 'cause they didn't get another Sirius Black who owned the motorbike that Hagrid used to escort Harry to Privet Drive appearing in Prisoner of Azkaban. If that's what you wanted the appeal of Harry Potter would be dead in the water with the giant squid after the last book. That's not me!Oh yeah, so it was a huge turning point in the series. Voldemort rises again, the romance shit (Rowling's one big flaw, in my mind). They got longer and less tightly edited (we fans were greedy for closer release dates. They had no one but themselves to blame!). Maybe some details got piled on (I can't remember which book had the useless James Potter quidditch info. Half-blood?). I think it was the Ron thing, anyway. D'oh. It has to be that. Maybe it was like season three of Buffy when Buffy goes to L.A. in the first episode and they still cut back to Sunnydale to show how the Scooby gang are faring without her. The new factors of the war is out there situation was like cutting into the Scooby dynamic. It's painful to go your own way and be all alone. It was like reaching the end half way through. Harry has to grow up, he has to defeat Lord Voldything and leave Hogwarts. And that's a sad feeling 'cause it means that I also have to leave Hogwarts. The bitching had to be about change. It still worked, it just worked in a different way. Change isn't popular.There are faults in the series but I loved what I loved so much that I didn't care. I just want to be in Hogwarts. I could tease about what I didn't like and still loved what I loved. How to be a Harry Potter fan in the style of Mariel 101. I'm sure I'll be rewarded with my Hogwarts letter any day now.D'oh! Of course! S.P.E.W. I remember now. (Society for Promotion of Elvish Welfare for the non-nerds. Oh wait, those people will not be reading this.) All the dumbfucks argued that the house elves wanted to be enslaved and that the point of the series was that Hermione was representing America rushing in to save oppressed civilizations when they shouldn't have been involved. (Dudes, they were probably the ones they needed saving from.) Uggggggh. So children should have always slaved away in factories because that was their only wages? Because they saw the film Newsies and Christian Bale looked like he was having a lot of fun? Killing Mudbloods is bad ("Sure, I don't want to kill kids but wars in the middle east are still a great idea!") but reading about equality for all is less interesting if it changes the bottom line? I probably started resenting the fanbase a whole lot right around that time. Rowling could have made the point less hammer-head like (via Hermione). The films succeeded in that quite well. But still! It is like being in the wizarding world itself to have read that kind of crap. Bigots everywhere. Poor Dobby! Sobs. (Winky was fucking annoying, though.)I also didn't mention the "Harry is a Death Eater" people. I wonder where they are right now. Probably in a dark corner of the internet somewhere, writing about the "truth" of the Harry Potter series. Grrrrrrrrrrrr. Harry is all that is good and pure in this world!P.s. I always skipped Quidditch scenes. The Triwizard scenes were kinda Quidditch-y to me. For that reason Goblet is my least favorite of the series. And I hated reading about Ron not liking Harry. But still! I remember when I got Goblet of Fire. I had to go to work and stop reading it. I didn't think about anything else but what was going to happen next in this book. Every other day was I numb with wanting to be anywhere else. That day I was happy to be in my own head. Goblet of Fire is a great book by my own definition because of that.
Here be warned: This review contains cursing. Greetings, loved ones, and let us talk of a young witch named Hermione Granger.Hermione is, and always has been, a delight to read. Not necessarily because she's a girl, but because she is the only character amongst those 14 year olds who actually has a good head on her shoulders. When I was young and gullible, I hated this book. Hated how it killed off Cedric and how bloody the series got afterwards. I hated it enough to renounce the franchize. Now that I re-read it, I still hate it, but for all different reasons. Cedric, on second reading, is as dull as toast (so I guess the movie casting must have been really spot-on). Harry has finally started to shed his unnatural maturity, and has turned just as obnoxious as most boys at 13. Ron is a wanker. So it's beyond me why Hermione hasn't stolen the spotlight here, as she is easily the most relatable character of them all.Let's look at her character - she is from a muggle family, but through hard work she has become the best student in the school. She studies hard, follows the rules, but makes exceptions when the circumstances are right. She comes off as stuck-up at first, but looks after her friends. She keeps her promises, even though she barely has time to take care of herself. And yet Ron is Harry's best friend, not her.Why?Harry and Ron are much closer than Harry and Hermione. In the previous book, Hermione was at odds with the boys not one, but twice, and that put a serious hinge on their friendship. Even so, that doesn't nearly come close to the drama that follows Harry and Ron's falling out in this book. And then, when they do make up, Hermione is once again pushed back as a tercery best friend, even though she sacrificed her efforts and sleep in order to help Harry learn a spell that would save his skinny ass.Hermione is defined by her intelligence. It falls squarely on her shoulders to help the guys when they're in a pickle - whenever they discover that rushing at an obstackle headfirst isn't going to cut it, they turn to her for advice, and she's also acutely aware of issues of inequality. In this book, she actually starts an organisation to help house elves! She stands up for Hagrid when Rita Skeeter takes a sling at him, and she kept Lupin's secret for months in book three simply because she believed he was a good guy! And where do her efforts to promote equality lead to? They're used for comedic relief.It's equally disgusting how little the boys seem to appreciate her. Not only do they refuse to take her seriously, they consider she's for granted. I mean, sure, Harry has lived with his relatives as an upper middle class brat (a much abused middle class brat), but Hermione's parents are dentists and yet she has a better awareness of social issues than he does! Is Rowling trying to suggest that young activism is only for women, because only women seem aware of these issues?But that's not even the worst this book gets. On the Yule Ball, Harry and Ron take ages before they realize Hermione is a girl, and thus, qualified to be a dance partner (obiously, they can't go with each other, altough it would be most logical, what with all the sparks flying among them). Hermione, though, refuses to be taken for granted. She knows she deserves better than to be a go-to girl, and she does - she gets to be Viktor Krum's date, and she damn well got someone who appreciates her! But are her friends happy for her? No, they're shocked, and in Ron's case, offended, that she dared *gasp* make plans without them! Ron goes as far as to make a scene - in which he (not for the first time) makes Hermione cry. This was supposed to establish some beginnings of the love between Hermione and Ron, but, quite frankly, it just makes Ron look like a wanker. After Rita Skeeter's article, Hermione becomes the target for bullying which, in some cases, turns rather dangerous. Grown-up witches send her hate mail packed with all sorts of deadly stuff, one of which makes the skin of her hands fall off. Ron's commentary? She should have seen it coming, messing around with the paparazzi like that. I bet the bumrag was happy she got punished for liking Krum. But that's not even what's most disturbing about this thing - it's that witches who have never even met Hermione before are willing to take Skeeter's word for it, even if the woman's as trustworthy as a snake. Even Mrs. Weasley, whose own husband got blackened twice in "The Daily Prophet", believes her! Nice message for female solidarity, Ms Rowling, real subtle.Again, I ask, why can't Hermione be the hero of these series? I don't think I'm alone in thinking it could be so much better.
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So after suffering through the first three books of this series, I vowed never to carry on and finish it. That is, until I was at a party and two of my friends gave the Harry Potter saga such a ringing endorsement that I was convinced I was missing out. I picked up the fourth book and was determined to read it, to reconsider my stance on the series.I quickly got through 200 pages, but it was then that I came to the same crisis I always do when reading a Harry Potter book: Do I really want to go on?And as always, the answer was no. So in keeping with my MO that "Life is too short to read books you're not interested in," I put it down and have no regrets.Sorry, Harry and the gang, I just have no interest in you or your adventures. I guess I never really "got" this phenomenon, and that's OK with me. There are better books out there.
—Liza Martin
Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/This was the turning point. Where the books ceased to be books and instead became a lifestyle. Where not only did I laugh, but also cried my eyes out. Where the Hogwarts students became MY friends. MY family. This was when I knew there was no going back and I was committed to the end."It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be." (And The Doctor was in the movie version - so BONUS!)
—Kelly (and the Book Boar)
This was the book that broke me from the HP series. My bride insists they got better, but she also married me, so her taste is... suspect.I loved Prisoner of Azkaban. Great struggle, clever time-travel story (very hard to do) and our first real glimpses of the dark places where this series would head. I liked that shift, I really did. So what broke me?Firstly, the plot holes. Well, more accurately, one plot hole, but it was a frackin' doozy. You know the opening scene in Star Wars where the camera is beneath the belly of the Star Destroyer and the shot just goes on and on for about ten frackin' minutes and you can practically hear George Lucas yelling "That's right, Star Destroyers are REALLY BIG, bitches!"? Well, this was a Star Destroyer sized plot hole. (view spoiler)[ Rowling goes to some length spelling out that portkeys can be anything. A cup. A book. A fluffy bunny. She also establishes that you can't teleport in and out of Hogwarts, because it's warded. Fair enough. BUT, Harry and his chums have often left the grounds of HG's, to go and drink 'butterbeer' or buy living chocolate frogs or snog in alleyways or whatever. The precedent has been set that they can and do leave the school grounds. FFS, Harry lived outside of Hogwarts for YEARS (and yeah Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru's [or whatever] place was magicked so folks couldn't find him, but how did he get back and forth to it, eh? A TRAIN.)SO, you are an evil overlord trying to take over the world. You need Harry's blood to get your body back. You have an agent WITHIN Hogwarts, despite all these magical defenses, disguised as a teacher that Harry implicitly trusts.Do you:a) Set in place an elaborate ruse, framed around this enormous tri-wizard tournament, which (presumably) is under scrutiny by the most powerful wizards in the world and the ministry of magic, in which you manipulate events so that Harry not only enters the tournament (despite rules that expressly say that he's not old enough) but wins it, touches the tri-wizard cup, which, despite all these defenses and wizard-y scrutiny and security, you've managed to turn into a frackin' portkey (yes, you're that good) so that he gets teleported away from the tourney grounds into your evil clutches and hey, you bleed that bitch.b) Have your agent (who Harry implicitly trusts) say "hey Potter, what's say we head down to the pub for a mug of butterbeer and I'll tell you some stuff about your dad/mum/long lost twin?" use all your evil-wizardyness to change a mug of butterbeer into a portkey, and save everyone around 400 pages of this book.Sorry, but I didn't buy it. I've read many fan arguments explaining why the tri-wizard tournament and everything around it wasn't window-dressing on an overly complicated plan, the fruits of which could have very easily been borne by a far less convoluted and complex Evil Scheme(tm) which, granted, probably wouldn't have made a very interesting book, but YOUR WAREZ, I AM NOT BUYING THEM. (hide spoiler)]
—Jay Kristoff
