A look at The Casual Vacancy

The Casual Vacancy

by J.K. Rowling

With nearly 4,000 reviews on Amazon, and 15,000 reviews on Goodreads, I won’t bore you with a summary of what the book is about.

I bought The Casual Vacancy for my wife when it came out. My daughter LOVES the Harry Potter series and is on her 3rd journey through that series of books right now and I was very interested in what her first “adult” book would be like.

That’s probably the first, and most important, thing: this book is for adults. I’m not prudish about life, and I’m completely open to literature of all sorts…from Dickens to Bret Easton Ellis to any Oprah Book Club selection, I will read it.

But there is periodic content in this book that would rob a child of innocence that they should be allowed to keep until they become adults. My advice…don’t let anyone under 18 near it. But that decision is yours as a parent…it’s only my opinion, and you know what they say about opinions and such.

The book was okay. The topics didn’t appeal to me, but the writing was decent, good in parts, but nothing really reached out and grabbed me about it. The main topics were sex, drugs, and a variety of struggling relationships. Some characters were VERY unbelievable to me.

I started reading the book earlier than I thought I would because my wife didn’t finish it. She’s less tolerant of the edgy topics.

I think 3 stars is fair. I don’t believe in insulting authors and/or their writing…it’s like insulting a mother or father for their parenting style…I think it indicates poor character to attack and insult an author or their writing.  Authors spend months and years creating their babies, their books, and they deserve credit for their effort. I think all we, as readers, can legitimately do is say that a book wasn’t for us and move on.

And so: this book was okay, but it wasn’t for me. Maybe it’s for you.

Cheers!