[In the following review, Pate affirms that what is rumored about Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is true, but chooses not to give any of its secrets away.]

Dragons and giants and mazes, oh my! Death Eaters and Dark Marks and curses, gee whiz! And let's not forget You-Know-Who..

J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire offers all of the above and more—much more— in its 734 deftly plotted, thrill-packed pages. The pivotal fourth book in the phenomenally popular series about a fledgling wizard is too long to be quite the midnight oil-burner of its predecessor, The Prisoner of Azkaban, but many of its pages fly by as fast as Harry's Firebolt racing broom. And even the saggier of the 37 chapters will please Potter fans with their rich details of Harry's fourth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Yes, pretty much everything you've heard about the book is true. A character readers care about dies. Harry turns 14 and starts paying more attention to girls, especially when he has to invite one to the Yule Ball. And Harry and his friends Ron and Hermione get to go to the Quidditch World Cup—the most important sporting competition in the wizard world—but it serves as just a set-up for the novel's true centerpiece, the Triwizard Tournament.

In this dangerous event, representatives from three European schools of wizardry compete in a series of death-defying challenges involving magical creatures, spells, charms and hexes. Meanwhile, Harry's mortal enemy, Lord Voldemort, the dark wizard who murdered Harry's parents and whose powers were diminished when he failed to kill baby Harry, is plotting his comeback. Harry suspects Voldemort may be nearby because the lightning-bolt scar left on his forehead after the attack has begun to ache. The Death Eaters—masked supporters of Voldemort—stage a march at the World Cup, tossing around Muggles, ordinary people without magical powers. A fearful skull-image appears in the night sky … And all this happens in the book's first 100 pages.

It's no secret that part of the appeal of the Potter books lies in their secrets and the thrill of discovery. So we're not going to be giving away too much here. Rowling follows her by now-familiar formula of mixing the magical with the mundane, involving Harry and his friends in one hair-raising adventure after another, leavening the tension with her trademark humor.

Harry and his friends may be wizards but they are still young teens who love silly jokes, gorge on candy, get mad at their friends and worry about everything from their appearances to their grades. One girl tries to cure her acne with a curse and now her nose is off-center. Not surprisingly, Hermione “is the only person in class who has managed to turn a hedgehog into a satisfactory pincushion.” Everyone pays attention to sneering Professor Snape's Potions lessons on antidotes “because he had hinted that he might be poisoning one of them before Christmas to see if their antidotes worked.”

These kinds of lines lead to grins, but Harry's ongoing battle against evil is no laughing matter. Each book is darker and more complex than the one before, and Goblet of Fire moves inexorably toward a chilling climax. But even then Rowling isn't finished, adding some more twists before concluding with a chapter appropriately titled “The Beginning.” It's not so much a cliffhanger as a compass indicating the direction of the fifth book in what she has said will be a seven-volume sequence.

After finishing Goblet—and we haven't even talked about grindylows, Mad-Eye Moody, the House Elf Liberation Front and the three Unforgivable Curses—you may well wonder what Rowling has left up her imaginative sleeve. My bet is plenty. The Harry Potter series is a classic fantasy quest as its appealing young hero, with the help of loyal friends and wise mentors (Albus Dumbledore resembles Tolkien's Gandalf and T. H. White's Merlin more and more), calls upon his own courage to find his true destiny. That quest continues, so like Arthur Weasley, I'd start collecting batteries now just in case the “ekeltricity” goes off. Trust me, you don't want to be left in the dark with You-Know-Who …