Book of the Week #16: The Casual Vacancy

So, let’s play catch-up a little bit.

This is the book I read last week. I finished it Wednesday. You might have heard of it…it’s called The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling. It’s her first book for adults, which I think is fantastic because those of us who grew up hugging the Harry Potter franchise are adults now. It seemed to dovetail perfectly. I bet she planned it.

Anyway. The book is about this perfect little town called Pagford, and England is seemingly full of these little perfect towns from what I gather. One of the men on the parish council (I assume that’s somewhat similar to a village/town council. I have trouble with these things) dies suddenly, and the town stops being so perfect. People are vying to take his spot on the council, and it turns out that everyone in the town hates each other, and it simply isn’t the perfect town everyone thought that it was.

If we’re being honest, I, like supposedly 99% of the other people who read this book, picked it up solely because it was written by JK Rowling. After reading it, I feel like that wasn’t enough. This feels like when you expect a child prodigy to be brilliant their entire life, but in the end, they fail to measure up. JK Rowling had a magnificently lucky break when it came to Harry Potter, and I loved those books. They were, and still are, a huge part of my life. Vacancy just couldn’t measure up. It was awfully wordy, and Rowling tended to repeat the same sort of sentences and phrases a lot. It’s difficult to describe, but if you read this book, you’ll understand what I mean. I also found the characters to be a little dry and clichéd. If anything, my favourite person was the dead one.

I’m really conflicted. I want to love this book, but I don’t feel that swell of emotion that I feel for my other favourite books. Oh well. I suppose you can’t love them all. I suppose, if anything, I was really hoping for a book that would blow me away. My past couple books of the week have been lacklustre, and I was hoping for the combo breaker. I’d say that it’s a solid 5/10. Critically, it appears that others like it, so perhaps it’s just me.

This week, I’m reading Uglies, and I’ve heard magnificent things about it, so stay tuned for that. Also in the "stay-tuned" department, this week I'm a little more on the ball with the blog, and I'm sure we can all look forward to that after a couple weeks of being all over the place.