A Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling
The picture of village life painted by JK Rowling in her latest novel is downright ghastly.
According to Nick Clark in the Independent last month, this book made the top five 'putdownable' books. It shared that embarrassment with Fifty Shades of Grey.
(To digress for a moment, I confess I was glad to hear that reading just the beginning of Shades of Grey is more than enough for many. This gives me hope for the future of the novel.)
As for A Casual Vacancy, I can see why readers abandon it. The characters are nasty in varying degrees, with the possible exception of Gavin, who dies in the first scene. The others are all up to something unsavoury. Listening on CD, I asked myself, three disks in, just who is the protagonist here? Who can I possibly root for?
Rowling's technique of using limited omniscient point of view to shift from one character to another worked for me at first, but the number of points of view kept piling up. This made it even harder to identify the protagonist, if any.
A departure from the Harry Potter series of seven, which enjoyed historic success, this book came out in October 2012. As far as I'm concerned, it can go right back in.
That's where my copy went -- back to the library unheard. Even when, determined to give the story one more chance, I pulled out CD 3 and put in the last one, it was still a yawn and I gave up.
Not usually attracted by this type of fantasy, I have read none of the Harry Potter stories, nor have I seen any of the movies. Maybe it's time I gave young Harry a chance. There must be good reason for the great success this author had with her original series.