Book 4:
The last two chapters of this book really had me silently sobbing. I'm not talking about the cute little trickling tears you get when something touches you, I mean the tears that just won't stop and fill your eyes so rapidly that you can hardly see. It was so odd for me because I had never cried over Cedric before. His death is sad, yes, but we didn't really get to know him that well. I wasn't even mainly crying for Cedric either. Just the whole situation made me angry and full of grief. I guess it really finally hit me that Harry can't be a kid anymore. First he has no parents, there's an evil less than human thing after him, and now he can't even enjoy the simple things because of all of the haunting memories he has. He watched someone die. When Dudley says, "Who's Cedric? Your boyfriend?", I am going to have to walk away from the book and rage in my bathroom or something. Everything just changed so quick, and it's all going to shit. Cornelius Fudge is the stupidest, popularity hungry, fat pig that ever comes into these books. God I am not looking forward to Umbridge because she is even worse. Friends, if I get moody over the next three days, blame it on that woman. It all just makes me want to cry for a long time and skip ahead to book seven where everything is fine, but alas that would be cheating, and then that victory would taste as sweet as it would if I read the next two.
That being said, I would like to address something that I have been thinking about ever since I was younger. The first time I read Goblet of Fire, I remember being thoroughly confused about Barty Crouch Jr. I had no idea that he was indeed pretending to be Moody at the time, so I recall my first impression of Barty Crouch Jr., or as I would like to call him Barty from now on, a lot different from the one we meet later on in GoF. Barty is nineteen, so possibly a year out of Hogwarts. He is brought into a trial where he is convicted of torturing Frank and Alice Longbottom into insanity. What struck me is how differently he acted in the trial compared to the other Death Eaters that were being convicted along with him. He was screaming to his father that he was innocent, that he didn't do it, he didn't know. What didn't he know? That line stumped me. I read on. Later after Dumbledore pulls Harry out of the pensieve, Dumbledore admits that because the crime was committed after Voldemort fell, the Ministry was hard-pressed to find the ones who did it, and because of the state of the Longbottoms, their evidence was not too reliable. Harry even asks Dumbledore if that means Barty might not have been involved, and he admits to not being able to answer. After I read this I thought, well he was wrongly convicted. I just couldn't believe that that young boy would be working with those evil people. Later when I read that he had actually been a Death Eater and feigned his own death, I was shocked! How could the boy we saw from the court room turn into this bloodthirsty, evil man? The shift in character was too much, but me being only ten at the time, I chose not to worry about it. As I older now and more keen to try and figure out what exactly happened to Barty, I read his scenes carefully, making note of everything he said. What I have deducted from my character research on Barty is that he was just too young to know what he was really doing the first time round. He didn't really know that he was going to torture them into insanity. It clearly scared him, but I think it was his time spent in Azkaban that really made him into the madman that he was. He was so innocent in the beginning, but then we see such a broad character shift in him. He is a minor character in the series, but he is one with the most depth.
Question: How did Voldemort get his old wand back? It should still be at Godric's Hollow where his soul split.
Ok, I have to go read OotP now. I get a nice long break from work, so I'll be able to read a lot more during the day.
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