Review: The Casual Vacancy

The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I picked up this book fully aware that it would not be Harry Potter.  And Harry Potter it definitely is not.  There is an immense amount of cussing in the book and other adult subject matter so if your kid is bugging you about reading this book, don't give in.  Fair warning.  They'd probably be bored anyway.  It's not written for them.

I've seen from a lot of the other reviews that people find this book dull and boring.  I've also heard that it's nothing special for its genre.  And also that they don't like the characters.

About the dull and boring part, it is set in the "real" world and it is about mostly every day life.  I normally give a book about 2 chapters before I put it down if I find it too boring.  The opening of the book starts with a death and made it interesting enough for me to continue.  Even though she's writing for adults, I find that she writes with the same level of detail as Harry Potter and that has kept the book interesting for me even if the subject matter isn't terribly fascinating.

In reference to the genre, I normally don't read books like this so I can't comment.

My only complaint about the characters is that she really bombards you with characters in the first few chapters.  I wasn't sure I could keep track of them but after the initial bombardment, she started to flesh each family out in more detail and now I have no trouble with all of them (be warned, there are a LOT of characters).  They are decently fleshed out, well, as much fleshing out as you can with this many characters.  It's not Harry Potter where Harry was oober fleshed out and Hermione and Ron were very well fleshed out and even the minor characters had a decent amount of depth.

After finishing the book, I will say that it was fairly interesting.  The writing is good but I didn't like the ending and it's not interesting enough for me to read it a second time. Hence the two stars I'm giving it.


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