Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Having established a winning setup with The Prisoner of Azkaban - slow start, long and baffling middle, big batch of clarifying reveals at the end - it seems that JKR decided to go down the ‘if it ain't broke don't fix it' route With The Goblet of Fire and stretched the same format out to fill an extra two hundred pages, when really she could just have cut out the bits with the blast ended skrewts or Hermione's quest for the emancipation of the house elves and written a shorter, tighter story. Im giving her the benefit of the doubt and assuming that these points must evolve into something significant in later books because they were unnecessary here.

It's interesting to note that The Goblet of Fire, like the previous books in the series, came out a year after its predecessor. The remaining three books have two or three years between releases. With this book being significantly bigger than the first three, I do wonder if JKR rushed it and if that's what's responsible for its many niggling mistakes. Her inability to punctuate Sirius's name properly throughout was incredibly irritating, not to mention her continued insistence on using ellipses where they're completely redundant, for the third book running. She's also come to rely on a select few favourite phrases so much that their repetition now jolts me entirely out of my reading (Hagrid's ‘beetle black eyes', or ‘bottle brush tail' in reference to Crookshanks being the worst offenders).

On the plus side the Weasleys remain absolutely adorable, and I think Mr and Mrs Weasley might be my favourite characters of the whole series. I could have wept when Mrs Weasley and Bill turned up in place of Harry's family for the final task in the tournament. I enjoyed the introduction of Mad Eye Moody and his roaming, magic eye, and I hope we'll see him again after his convalescence. I'm looking forward to finding out what that glint in Dumbledore's eye meant, and also if Fred and George do invest all that gold in a joke shop. I suspect not though.

3.5 stars.