Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
by J. K. Rowling
Summary
The fourth book is where the series stops being about school. It opens at the Quidditch World Cup, where masked wizards attack the campsite afterwards and a symbol nobody has seen for thirteen years appears in the sky, and it ends in a graveyard with a murder and a resurrection.
In between, Hogwarts hosts the Triwizard Tournament against two visiting schools, and Harry's name comes out of the goblet although he is three years too young and did not enter. He faces a dragon, an hour underwater and a hedge maze, watched by a school that mostly believes he cheated. Meanwhile Ron stops speaking to him out of jealousy, Hermione starts a campaign for house elf rights that everyone finds embarrassing, and a tabloid reporter called Rita Skeeter demonstrates what the press does to a fourteen year old.
At around six hundred pages it is far longer than the third book, and it is the volume where the plotting turns genuinely intricate, with a solution that reframes the entire year.
It is also where the series first kills someone the reader knows, plainly and pointlessly, in a way that changed what parents assumed these books were.
The Yule Ball is the other reason people remember this one. An entire subplot about who asks whom to a dance, played for maximum adolescent humiliation, sits alongside a plot to murder a child, and Rowling moves between the two without either undercutting the other.
Mad Eye Moody, the paranoid new Defence teacher with a magical eye and a habit of demonstrating unforgivable curses on insects, is the best adult character in the series.
Read the first three first. Best for readers already three books in and wondering where the series turns dark. It turns here, and it does not turn back.
Historical Context & Significance
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire won the 2001 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the only book in the series to do so, beating a ballot that included George R. R. Martin's A Storm of Swords.
It remains among the most argued about results in the award's history. The objection then and since is that the win came at the peak of the series' commercial moment, that voters were rewarding a phenomenon rather than a novel, and that a stronger field lost to a children's book. The defence is that the Hugo is a popular vote by the members of the World Science Fiction Convention, and this is what they voted for.
The book was published in 2000 with a print run and midnight release on a scale the trade had never attempted before, and it changed how children's publishing operates.