As the Harry Potter books are slowly released on J.K. Rowling’s interactive website Pottermore, we’re treated to more and more inside knowledge about characters, events, and story lines of the wizarding world. Now the fourth novel in the series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, has been released and if you’re a member of the site (it’s free, of course) you can read a brand new original story featuring Harry, Ron, Hermione, and other members of Dumbledore’s Army. The short story is told as a gossip news piece by Rita Skeeter, who writes about spotting the “celebrities” at the Quidditch World Cup Final. Rita is apparently still employed at the Daily Prophet, though (thank goodness) she is no longer a legitimate news writer but aptly named Daily Prohet’s “Gossip Correspondent.”
You can read the whole piece on Today.com right here.
Even after publishing the new story, Rowling insists that she has no plans to write more about adult Harry. For some, that comes as a severe (though probably not totally unexpected) disappointment. For others, it seems right that she wouldn’t do so. Rita’s gossip piece tells us a lot about where some of our favorite characters “currently” are in their lives and in delivering this information through Rita’s signature bitter, scathing, and absolutely-so-ridiculous-it’s-hilarious viewpoint, Rowling avoids another “Nineteen years later” sort of piece, where information seems thrown at us and everything fels a bit stiff.
These characters are happy, their lives settled, and instead of seeing it through Harry’s perspective, we get to laugh at Rita’s crackpot notions that they aren’t. And, since we can’t believe anything that Rita speculates as genuine concern, we can be pretty darn sure that in Harry’s world, there’s not too much to worry about. Instead of being told outright that “all is (still) well,” readers and fans of Harry Potter can take comfort in Rita’s ridiculous attempts to make it seem that it is anything but.
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