Okay, now it's getting good. In this fourth installment, the reader starts to discern that Rowling is taking the series ultimately to a gratifying, climactic head that will be worth having read the first three volumes.

And these are just that - volumes. HP4 here clocks at 734 pages, and I see already that HP5 is 870. Guh! In this age of ADD-riddled adolescents, who has the time and patience to read a book that long? (This ADD-addled one doesn't.) But, well, this isn't the heavy stuff of Thomas Pynchon, so we can allot Rowling her page counts. Lord knows the publishers did.

The distraction in this book is the Triwizard Tournament that brings in (good grief!) more characters from two other wizarding schools, French and Slovak if you must know. It's funny to see present-day geography repped in these books; the accents are comically and phonetically presented, and a dimwitted witch finds herself in Albania and reaps the consequences after running into You-Know-Who.

The conclusion of HP4 is satisfying though the series is hardly over. One fairly major character does not make it out of this book, and while I knew that going in actually, the departure is sure abrupt.

The usual suspects are coming into their own. Hermione and Ron are great as Harry's boy and girl wonders, funny and biting by turns. Dumbledore and Snape are always becoming more fully realized, though McGonagall seems slighted as each volume goes by. (Maybe she gets more play in the three to come?) And the latest Defense Against the Dark Arts instructor, Mad-Eye Moody, is a great add. (Of course he can't last.)

My lone gripe here: Rowling uses too many ellipses. I know it's a small gripe, but it's distracting when, in most places, a comma would have been mighty fine.

Regardless, the show marches on like the giant it is.