"Goblet of Fire" was published when I was nine. Up until that point, I had been playing catch up with J.K. Rowling — I finished one book and then started tracking down the next, either by adding my name to the waiting list at my school's library or pestering my mother to buy it for me. Book four, however, was the start of the waiting process that would stretch through my adolescence.
I finished "Prisoner of Azkaban" and then started the wait. "Goblet" hit shelves in the early day of July that preceded my turn through fourth grade, and I was more impatient for that book than the approaching days of school-less sun. I woke up just as it was getting light outside and waited some more — both for my mother to wake up and for the bookstore to open.
I remember that morning was sunny and breezy. We were there when the store opened, and I quickly found my treasure on the shelves. Harry Potter mania had not yet reached its peak in the pre-movie-franchise era, so there was no fancy storefront display. Just a beautifully illustrated cover nestled among the other books.
Mom would only buy one copy — for my brother and me to share. There was a little bit of tussling in the backseat on the way home as we fought over not only who got to read it first, but also who got to hold it and admire that swirling pastel cover.
Inspired by our painful wait, we had decided ahead of time to only read a chapter a day. The 37 chapters would put us 37 days closer to the release of the next book.
I can safely say that my time reading "Goblet" was the height of my love of reading. I took in every word with care and painstaking attention. When I finished my daily chapter, I would go back over the parts I liked or try to work through hints the book left me. I marveled in the language and the character quirks that had become familiar to me now, as if I were reading about the definitive traits of real people I knew.
Even now, rereading the book, it amazes me the power Rowling has to invoke emotion from her readers. Rita Skeeter's articles enraged me at the age of nine and left me just as furious at the age of 20. One of "Goblet's" main messages — that someone's age should not lead you to underestimate them — is perhaps one of the main reasons Harry Potter was so successful. Even though Harry's stories are written for children, Rowling does not talk down to them.
In "Goblet," she has this 14-year-old wizard competing in deadly tasks with 17- and 18-year-olds. Now that I'm old, I laugh a little at the idea of a freshman in high school doing everything Harry does. In the earlier books, Harry was described as scrawny, and when I think back to the boys I started high school with, many of them were laughably shorter than I was. To picture a 5'4", scrappy 14-year-old standing alongside fully-grown men and women in competition is also laughable — but at the age of nine, I had no doubt that Harry could do it. Rowling instilled that certainty in me. She had faith in the abilities —physically, mentally, and emotionally — of the young children to whom she was writing, and that made them have faith in Harry and themselves. It was, perhaps, this brand of Rowling's own magic that made her young hero's tale.
The fourth book was the right time to reaffirm that belief in the strength of young people, because it coincided with the point when Rowling's story took a dark turn. Voldemort returns. It is something the books lead up to, but at the time I was as surprised as any of the characters. As Fudge says, he just couldn't be back. A wizard who had caused so much damage the first time around that people in the present still wouldn't speak his name was back, and neither Rowling's characters nor I knew what that would mean.
From that moment on, Harry was thrust into a world where he wasn't just famous for the horrors of his past, but famous for the horrors he would endure as a real person. A huge scale battle was about to erupt around someone immensely powerful and a teenager — someone close to my age.
I was scared for Harry, like Dumbledore, Hermione, Sirius, the Weasleys, and others readers alike. I thought he was outmatched. But I never thought, "He's just 14, he can't handle this."
By then, Rowling had assured me that he could and he would. She showed me that neither dreams nor problems could be too big for teenagers to handle. And I would never forget that.
As he heads back to a summer with the Dursleys, Harry says he will face things as they come. And so would we, both in our troubled adolescent lives and in our magical worlds. When I closed that book 37 days after first holding it in my hands, I couldn't have known it would be almost three years before Rowling blessed me with Harry's next tale. By then, my patience had snapped, and there was no hope of only taking in a chapter a day.
