Title:
Author: JK Rowling
Publisher: Scholastic
Year Published: 1999
Genres: Young Adult, Fantasy, Bildungsroman
It is remarkable how much more focused this book is than Chamber of Secrets. The story itself is much deeper and much more robust, fleshing out 435 pages in the paperback edition, over 100 pages longer than Chamber of Secrets and nearly 150 pages longer than Sorcerer’s Stone. Gone is the collection of secrets that Rowling keeps hidden from the reader until everything has been accomplished, and it is a very refreshing change to have the primary story start on the very first page.
There is still mystery, and there are still twists and turns and subplots, but everything is remarkably well crafted and the story is, as expected, rock-solid. There were even times when I couldn’t help myself… I was simply compelled to laugh out loud. In the end I stayed up well later than I should have finishing the book rather than put it down and save the last 80 pages or so for a more reasonable hour of reading.
I don’t know if Rowling and Scholastic changed editors, or if she just got that much better at structuring her story, but it paid off, and it paid off huge.
Title:
Author: JK Rowling
Publisher: Scholastic
Year Published: 2000
Genres: Young Adult, Fantasy, Bildungsroman
Goblet of Fire marks a tremendous step forward in the style of the Harry Potter series. Realizing her heroes and heroines are now 15 years old, Rowling ups the stakes in their personal relationships, development, and maturation. In short, this is no longer just a kid’s book, with the innocent conquering the guilty. In the fourth year of the series, I have to believe that Rowling was well aware that some of her initial readers had moved on to college. She needed deeper stories with more universal issues to hold them, as well as attract the new, younger audience she has been so successful at reaching.
Rowling achieves this, but at a tremendous cost. At 734 pages, Goblet of Fire is, comparatively speaking, massive. More than double the size of book 1, it will absolutely prove to be daunting task for any reader under the age of 15. But that is not who Rowling is targeting now, in my opinion. Her audience has matured along with her characters, and that is who she is writing for. Her style remains much the same, right down to her struggle with proper comma and semi-colon usage, but her themes have become much more complex. Sexual tension, life and death, and temptation are now mixed in with her standard themes of good versus evil and friendship, and she makes the transformation remarkable well.
My main complaint is that, once again, Rowling relied upon that “ah-ha” moment at the end of the book to tie up all the loose ends. Unlike Chamber of Secrets, however, it is done here in a manner that justified the “facts” being hidden from both Harry and the reader. Still, however, I find it a disappointment that almost the entire novel is summed up in about 4 pages by the book’s villain. It is an understandable choice to make, but, for me, the revelation scene was perhaps the single most boring scene in the last ½ of the book. It worked better than Harry’s revelation in Chamber of Secrets, I think, but it was a poor conclusion to the heavy action, suspense, and drama that immediately preceded it.
That said, it didn’t detract much from the overall story, and the inclusion of the more complex themes makes Goblet of Fire the best book in the series up to this point.
[11-2-2007: Edit- As I mentioned in an earlier post, I wrote these mini-reviews as I re-read the series. At some point, I came across a review and commentary by Stephen King (of whom I am a tremendous fan) that addresses a few of the same things I do, and a whole lot more. You can find it here on the Entertainment Weekly site. I highly recommend it as he covers quite a bit more than just a review of Deathly Hallows]
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