Last week, I talked about my thoughts as I reread the first two Harry Potter books. This week, I’m going to share my thoughts on the next three books in the series, Prisoner of Azkaban, Goblet of Fire, and Order of the Phoenix, which I reread in January and February.
Quick reminder, there will be spoilers in these posts, and if you don’t want to be spoiled for whatever reason, you shouldn’t read this.
I love all the different ways you can group the Harry Potter books. For example, my initial plan for these posts was to talk about the first three books in one post, then books four and five, then books six and seven. This would group the three shorter books, which are commonly thought of as middle grade books together. Things get darker in books four and five, but in some sense they’re sort of transition books as Voldemort gains strength and returns to power but stays hidden in the shadows. And then I would talk about the sixth and seventh book as the climax and wrap-up of the series with the wizarding world’s second war. I changed this plan because my post for the first three books would have been really long. But once I rethought where I split the books, this also seemed a natural split. The first two books introduce us to the wizarding world, the characters, the villain, the plot (including details that will definitely come back in the later books). In the third book, we really dive into the circumstances around Harry’s parents’ murder and the fall of Voldemort, and of course Wormtail escaping at the end paves the way for the fourth book. In the fourth book, Harry is kind of a puppet in Voldemort’s plan, which succeeds. And in the fifth book, Harry is fighting to get people to believe what happened. These three books also follow Harry’s relationship with Sirius, and Prisoner of Azkaban is the first book in which Harry’s victory is not absolute (and it only goes downhill from there). There are certainly other ways you could group the books: 1 and 2, 3 and 4, and then 5 6 and 7; or 1 2 3 4 and then 5 6 7; or 1 2 3 and then 4 5 6 7; or anything else you can think of. You could even group 2 and 6 together, or 1 and 5. There’s so much in these books I’m sure you could find all manner of reasons to group them any way you want. I chose my organization scheme because it fit well with three mid-length posts.
So let’s dive in.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
I’ll say from the get-go that this may be one of my favorite books in the series. It goes back and forth between this book and the fourth book. I love this one so much! It’s so tightly plotted (everything is important to the plot here). It deals with the larger plot of the series with all the Voldemort stuff and yet it’s still really fun and innocent (compared to what comes next). And there are just so many feelings everywhere. This book really feels like the time when Harry is starting to grow up more, and I love it. If people were to ask me what’s the sort of book you would want to write, I would say Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
Also fair warning, last time I read this I was taking notes to write a paper on multiparty negotiations in this book for my multiparty negotiations course. The thesis boils down to Lupin is awesome. But don’t be surprised if some of that theory pops up in these comments.
Re: my comment last week about a whole bunch of characters missing big chunks of the school year in Chamber of Secrets, I think it’s possible the professors give them summer homework to catch everybody up. I’m almost positive the only other time homework is mentioned over the summer is in Chamber of Secrets, when Hermione tells Ron and Harry she’s been busy with schoolwork, and Ron is horrified because it’s the summer.
As Harry opens his first ever birthday cards and presents from his friends at the start of this book, I do wonder about everybody else’s birthdays. I know we can’t be celebrating birthdays constantly, and Ron’s comes up in the sixth book when he’s poisoned, and Hermione buys Crookshanks as an early birthday present for herself, but it would be nice to see Ron’s and Hermione’s birthdays recognized for fun, or to see how birthdays are handled at Hogwarts.
Aunt Marge is an awful person and she totally deserved to get blown up.
Interesting thing that I knew subliminally but just put into words as I’m reading today: Lupin knows that dementors make you relive your worst memories, so when Harry says that he heard someone screaming on the train, Lupin probably has a good idea of what’s going on. I love Lupin.
Trelawney may be a fraud, but almost everything that is predicted in the first divination class comes true, even the things that Harry and Ron predict about each other. Also, why doesn’t Trelawney repair Neville’s broken teacup with magic?
Hermione is a really good liar. Like when Ron is questioning her about her wacky schedule, she is totally cool about it. I could not do this.
I don’t quite get why Malfoy is able to get away with faking his injury for so long. We all know Madam Pomfrey can mend cuts really easily, so I don’t see how he could get away with it for so long. Like okay the ministry could still have gone after Buckbeak even without Malfoy having his arm in a sling for months, but why do the Hogwarts teachers put up with it?
Something else I have always wondered, when Sirius Black is sighted not far from Hogwars, I really want to know why he let himself be seen. Like why be a human at all? It’s not a big deal but I’m curious.
I really like the reading of the scene where Harry asks McGonagall for permission to go into Hogsmeade that McGonagall would have let him go if not for Sirius Black. She did some spying on the Dursleys back in Sorcerer’s Stone and probably has a decent sense of what Harry’s up against with them.
I just want to pause to note that Harry is just having a really bad year. Maybe that’s why I like this book so much: the tension keeps building and things go from bad to worse for everything that Harry cares about and he has so many feelings I just love it. Also Lupin is the best.
Is it me or is Harry’s schedule really inconsistent in this book? Unless I was wrong in my earlier comment that September 1 is always a Sunday because classes always start on a Monday. Right now, I’m pretty sure at first Harry was going to divination, transfiguration, and care of magical creatures on Mondays, but in November he also has defense against the dark arts on Mondays. I recognize that now I’m just being really nitpicky.
Okay, I feel stupid. It took me two and a half years of law school to realize that when Harry, Ron, and Hermione are helping Hagrid build a defense for Buckbeak, they’re doing legal research. They’re looking up precedent and building arguments around that precedent. I am once again impressed by Hermione’s brains—I doubt it was Harry and Ron’s idea. I definitely did not know how to do this at thirteen. Sometimes I doubt I know how to do it now (just kidding).
I’ve always wished that Harry took arithmancy, because I really want to know what it is and how it works and what it does in the real world. Like we never actually find out in any of the books.
Every time I read this I always tear up when Harry and the team finally win the Quidditch Cup. There’s just something so great about that whole sequence in the books.
I always have a lot of fun with the climax of this book. It is so great in so many ways, but it’s also one of those sequences that has so many moving parts that it’s really fun to imagine how it would all change if one part changed. For example, what if they stayed at Hagrid’s to argue for Buckbeak? What if Dumbledore came with them to the Shrieking Shack? Or what if Harry, Ron, and Hermione made it back to the castle with Scabbers before Sirius caught up with them, but they met Lupin instead? How would it have played out if, instead of Lupin transforming and Pettigrew escaping, the whole group made it back to the castle to talk to Dumbledore? None of these scenarios, on their face, are as climactic as the scene in the Shrieking Shack, that fight with the dementors, and the sequence with the Time Turner, so obviously that all wins, but it’s a lot of fun to imagine how those scenes would go and how, as a writer, I might craft those alternate climaxes for maximum effect.
Why didn’t Lupin see the second Harry and Hermione on the map? Okay, I can see if he’s paying attention to Harry, Ron, and Hermione as they go down to Hagrid’s he might not notice any of the other hundred or so dots moving around, but Harry and Hermione from the future are retracing past Harry, Ron, and Hermione’s steps, so I feel like he would notice them. Of course, two Harry Potters could just break the map’s brain.
I know that there are all sorts of rules about not being seen when you go back in time with the Time Turner, but Hermione knows that she has a Time Turner, so I can imagine that she wouldn’t necessarily freak out and think there was dark magic afoot, which would allow Hermione to team up with her future self to do cool things. Or anyone with a Time Turner really. It kind of makes my head hurt to think about the logistics, but it seems like it would be a cool way to double your manpower.
Ugh the ending of this book gives me so many feelings and I love it. It’s the sort of book I’m sad to close, because I don’t want it to end, which is one of the highest compliments I can give a book.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
This is a close second to Prisoner of Azkaban for my favorite. They’re so close that sometimes this one edges out Prisoner of Azkaban. Sometimes.
The thing that I really like about all the Harry Potter books, but Prisoner of Azkaban and Goblet of Fire in particular, is how you can use them as examples for so many different aspects of writing a story. For example, I’m a big fan of how Goblet of Fire is put together—how much is going on and how it is orchestrated. Specifically, right now I’m looking at the first chapter. It’s practically a prologue, along the same lines as the first chapters of Sorcerer’s Stone and Deathly Hallows and the first two chapters of Half-Blood Prince. The first chapter of Goblet of Fire is masterful at this. It’s specific enough to tell a story, but it’s vague enough to leave you guessing for the rest of the book. At the same time, the vagueness feels natural. Voldemort and Wormtail’s conversation doesn’t feel like they’re deliberately skating the issue so the reader won’t know what’s coming. It feels like they’re having a normal conversation—or at least as normal a conversation as you can have with Lord Voldemort.
Another thing that I like about Goblet of Fire is that you dive right into the plot with that first chapter and then with Harry’s scar hurting and the Death Eater activity at the quidditch world cup. It takes a long time for them to get back to Hogwarts and for Harry’s name to come out of the goblet—about half the book actually—but it’s not wasted time.
Look, if you’re going to eat grapefruit as a means of dieting, you should just eat the whole grapefruit. Eating a quarter of a grapefruit is an awful lot of work for like twenty calories. That is not a sufficient breakfast, whatever kind of diet you’re trying. Note that I love grapefruit and carrot sticks and everything Uncle Vernon calls rabit food, and as much as I had fun reading The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook last year, I was pretty horrified by the way the characters regularly ate. But I am getting very sidetracked. My point is grapefruit is good; you should eat all of it.
Okay so the scene with the Weaselys and the Dursleys continues to be laugh-out-loud funny. But also a little horrifying, because if Mr. Weasley hadn’t held Harry back to get the Dursleys to say goodbye to him, they might have all been gone before Dudley ate the toffee.
I wonder what Charlie, who works with dragons, thinks about Bill wearing dragon-skin boots.
I’ve always wondered about Ron’s frog. Does it have a name? What happened to it?
Amos Digory mentions the Lovegoods going to the world cup, and I have a really hard time imagining Luna and her father at the world cup. Not that they don’t like Quidditch or anything, but it seems so normal, and they’re… the Lovegoods.
Okay, I lied earlier when I said September first is always a sunday. September 1 is a Monday in Goblet of Fire. But it’s definitely a Sunday in Order of the Phoenix, so the point still stands. And when they get to Hogwarts in Goblet of Fire they start classes on a Monday, even though two days ago it was Sunday. This is obviously not an important thing but it bugs me so much guys.
Did Dumbledore also mention that they don’t use charms, potions, or herbology as a punishment? It seems oddly specific that he would just tell Moody they don’t use transfiguration as a punishment. “Draco Malfoy the incredible bouncing ferret” is such a great scene, and I just like to imagine the conversation between Moody and Dumbledore when Dumbledore tells him specifically that they can’t use transfiguration as a punishment. Maybe Moody has a history of this sort of thing.
The tension leading up to the announcement of the champions is fantastic. I don’t know how many times I’ve read this book, but the scene in the great hall with the goblet spitting out the names gets me every time. It’s so powerful that every time I think maybe this time it will go differently. Of course it doesn’t.
The one thing about this book that I really don’t like is that it’s never really explained why Harry has to compete in the tournament once his name comes out of the goblet. What does a binding magical contract mean? What are the consequences if you break it? Is it like the unbreakable vow and you die? Or do you go to wizarding contracts court and argue that it isn’t a contract because there was no offer, acceptance, and consideration between the goblet and Harry, and anyway it would be unconscionable to force Harry to compete? (Huh, I guess I did learn something in contracts after all.) The point is, everybody keeps saying he has to compete, hee has to compete, they can’t get him out of it even though no one wants him to compete, and this would feel more realistic and more tense if the consequences of him just saying “no way” were clear.
Basically everything from Harry’s name coming out of the goblet up through the first task is so great. I love how the tension is so thick you can taste it. I always get super worked up about what’s going on. And then we get a well-timed break before things get crazy again with preparation for the second task onward. Not that the stuff that happens between the first and second tasks isn’t important, it’s just much less stressful.
I really love the casual way Neville just turns into a canary after the first task. It’s great.
DOBBY!!!
I always wonder how much information sharing is going on between Sirius and Dumbledore at this point in the book. Does Sirius tell Dumbledore that Harry saw Crouch on the map? It would explain how Dumbledore figured out Moody was actually Barty Crouch Jr. (I’ll come back to my forever confusion on that point later on), but I don’t think Sirius told Dumbledore about the map, because when Barty Jr. mentions the map later on, Dumbledore doesn’t know about it. Also, we learn later on (from Snape’s memories that we see in Deathly Hallows), that Dumbledore knows about the Dark Marks on the Death Eaters’ forearms and they’re getting stronger, but when Harry tells Sirius about Karkaroff showing Snape something on his arm, Sirius has no idea what that’s about. I’m not sure if the characters could have put everything together before all the bad stuff goes down if they’d sat down and had a good info sharing and brainstorming session, but they might have gotten closer.
So Dumbledore figures out that Moody isn’t Moody. Okay, I’m with him so far. But before Moody transforms into Barty Crouch Jr., Dumbledore has Snape go down to the kitchens to get Winky. It’s possible that he just thought whoever Moody was would tell them what happened to Mr. Crouch, but it’s almost like he knows who fake Moody really is before the Polyjuice potion wears off. He certainly doesn’t show surprise at fake Moody’s identity or even that Barty Jr. is still alive. But I just don’t get how he figured it out.
And then I just took a day to finish the whole book and had all the feelings. Oh god this book makes me cry. Every. Single. Time.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
This, like Chamber of Secrets, is one of those books that I appreciate a lot more now than I did when I first read it. Harry is so angsty this book, and it’s annoying. But when you read it right after Goblet of Fire, instead of waiting the years we did for it to come out when we were kids, it’s a lot more understandable. It’s only been a month since Voldemort killed Cedric in front of Harry and tried to kill him. In that month, he’s pretty much been totally isolated from the wizarding world—even his friends haven’t been telling him much—and when he comes back to the wizarding world, he’s still being kept in the dark and he’s facing most people not believing him. Not only not believing him, but actively attacking him. And he has serious PTSD, which was illustrated really well by the fact that when he’s attacked by the Dementors, he doesn’t hear his parents’ deaths anymore. He hears Voldemort taunting him in the graveyard. What happened at the end of Goblet of Fire is now Harry’s worst memory.
I have always wondered what a Budgerigar is, but it’s not important to the story, so I usually just keep reading. This time around, I finally googled it. It’s an Australian parakeet. Huh. Now I know why it’s news that a budgerigar learned to water-ski. That’s very important news indeed. Moving on.
Why do some people apparate with a pop and some people apparate with a loud crack? I’m pretty sure this is never explained.
I love how Mrs. Figg uses all the wizard idioms in the one conversation we have with her. It’s great.
This is the first book we don’t get a full summary of how Harry’s parents died and why he’s famous and that he’s a wizard and everything. We get information about the past books, but it’s woven into the action much more seamlessly. I think it makes sense. Up to book 4, you probably could pick up any of the books in the series and follow along reasonably well without having read the other books. But past the point when Voldemort returns, if you don’t already know the story you’re kind of lost anyway.
It always astounds me that characters like Tonks and Luna, who become so important to the series, are only introduced in book 5. I always think they must have come up sooner, but nope. They join the plot in Order of the Phoenix.
So if they can’t take down the screaming picture of Sirius’s mother, have they tried ways to keep the curtains permanently shut so she won’t scream at them constantly? Just my random thought.
Also, I would love to see the scene where Mrs. Weasley finds out that Harry, Ron, and Hermione have been communicating with Sirius in secret for a year. She handled it pretty well when he appeared at the end of Goblet of Fire, as in she stopped screaming when Ron said it was okay, but I imagine that was not the end of that discussion.
It struck me in this book that Dean Thomas is the only one of the students we meet who was raised by muggles but who also holds on to some of his muggle identity. Every year he puts up muggle soccer posters around his bed and in this book it mentions he has pajamas in his soccer team’s colors. Harry, Hermione, and Colin Creevey all pretty much abandon their muggle identities—understandable for Harry, at least, but interesting to think about for the other characters. And it makes me really curious about Dean.
Umbridge is such a great villain. I often rate her higher than Voldemort on my favorite villains list (yes, I have one of those), because while Voldemort is scary, he’s kind of generically scary. Umbridge is the kind of villain you just love to hate. I still remember how viscerally I reacted to her making Harry cut open his own hand and write “I must not tell lies” in his own blood the first time I read the book, and I still have that reaction. It’s smaller, but somehow more sadistic, than Voldemort’s torture.
I think everything with Dumbledore’s Army might just be my favorite part of this book.
Umbridge says the ministry would want Snape to remove the strengthening solution from the potions syllabus. What in the world does that potion strengthen?
I really appreciate how thoughtful and emotionally intelligent Hermione is in this book. It really shows as they’re planning Dumbledore’s Army and talking about Sirius and Harry and Cho. I’m not saying she wasn’t those things in the previous books, but I think it comes out a lot more in this book and shows how she’s matured as a character, especially since the fourth book.
Taking notes like this as I read, I’m noticing just how much changes in the fifth book. I already mentioned we don’t get the “previously on Harry Potter…” bit at the beginning. This is also the first book where nothing happens on Halloween, and we lose Quidditch as an important part of the plot as well (more on that in a second). And these changes persist into the later books. You can definitely tell things are getting darker.
DOBBY!!!
The thing with Harry beating up Malfoy and getting banned from playing quidditch always really bugged me. I wish there had been more internal build-up with Harry’s thoughts and feelings in the moments leading up to him snapping like that. Intellectually, I know it’s probably all the things boiling over at this moment, but we don’t see it, and in the past Malfoy has definitely said worse and Harry’s just brushed it off. I think this is the moment, during this reread of the book, when I lose a lot of sympathy for Harry’s feelings. It’s definitely a good plot point, and Umbridge continues to be the worst—really, the worst—but also, come on Harry, show a little restraint, please. No? No? Okay fine no more Quidditch for you.
I really want to know how Hagrid and Madame Maxime carried a branch of everlasting fire across two countries to bring it to the giants. I know, the answer is probably “magic,” but I want to know how.
So J. K. Rowling does this great thing where she brings something up early in the book and then it comes back in a way that has nothing to do with how it first came up. I particularly love it when she does it for a chapter title. A small amount of explanation before I clarify what I’m talking about. I’m the sort of person who likes to read the table of contents before I jump into a book, because I like chapter titles. I remember, when my older brother got Goblet of Fire the day it came out, and I had to wait a few weeks to get it in Braille, I got him to read me the table of contents out loud. That was what I asked for. Another importans fact is that the Braille editions of Harry Potter are broken into volumes, because Braille is so much bigger than print. The fifth book is thirteen volumes (I have a whole wall of Harry Potter in my bedroom). So at the start of each volume is the table of contents for that volume, so I usually read that before I start on that volume. So earlier in the fifth book, Malfoy brings up St. Mungo’s and the closed ward. And so the chapter titles “St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries” and “Christmas on the Closed Ward” always made me think that Harry was going to be sent to St. Mungo’s. Obviously, that’s not what happened, but I loved the effect Malfoy’s reference to St. Mungo’s and then reading the chapter titles again when I got to them two or three volumes later had on me. This is probably entirely a Jameyanne phenomenon, but it happens a couple other times in the books (can’t think of them right now), so I wanted to share.
Oh wow Harry’s date with Cho is so awkward. So awkward. He isn’t as emotionally stupid as Ron, but he really makes a mess of things. Cho is pretty awful though as well, to be fair. I mean, it’s so obvious that Harry doesn’t like what’s going on and she’s pulling all this on him. It definitely feels realistic to me, but it’s still a painful scene to read.
I will forever love the whole sequence in the Department of Mysteries. It is epic!
I will also forever be mad about the two-way mirror. I know it’s important later, and I guess it makes sense why Harry didn’t open it before, but this is definitely one of those times when a character does something totally stupid and that’s what caused everything to go horribly wrong. And I kind of hate it when authors do that. In this case, it’s not even an important stupid thing. He just never opened it and forgot about it.
All in all, this is a book I appreciate more and more as I get older. It’s not one of my favorites of the series, but it is a good book, and so much great stuff happens.
And that’s it for these three books. I haven’t finished rereading Deathly Hallows yet, but I’ll be back soon with my thoughts on Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows.