Title The casual vacancy / J.K. Rowling.

SRP 2013 REVIEW: Not your kid' Harry Potter!

SRP 2013 REVIEW: This is definitely not Harry Potter! Rowling still manages to spin an intricate web of characters, making the reader invested in the happenings in tiny Pagford.

SRP 2013 REVIEW: To anyone under the age of 18: I have to say this once, because it is required of my duty as an avid reader: THIS BOOK IS NOT FOR CHILDREN. I cannot stress this point enough. Yes, I understand that this is the same person that wrote your *favorite* books growing up, but this is absolutely nothing like the magical world of Harry Potter Now onto the actual review: After being a Harry Potter lover and reading the very first book when I was in the second grade (I am currently 19 years of age), I could help but pick this book off the shelf. I had not heard many reviews, but I saw that it was on the NYT Bestsellers list for a while, so I said "Hey, why not?". Rowling, after having been living in the fantasy world of Hogwarts, does a little 180 with this book. No magic or mythical creatures this time. That being said, I was going to try really hard and not compare this novel with her past works, but I simply cannot make my point without it. Harry Potter, set in the richly imagined fictional world that it is, was still instantly recognizable by it's readers, because the arguments are between the very large, and very simple: Good vs. Evil. It has been the basis for books, movies, television and radio shows for generations. Emotions connect readers to characters, and it is so easy to pick a side and connect emotional values with the characters, a small child can enjoy it It's the reason why the previous series was as popular with children as it was with adults. Casual Vacancy, on the other hand, was arguments between gossiping liberals and conservatives. Yes, you read that right: Political drama. Set in a small fictional town in England, this book reads like a soap opera... a really dark and twisted one at that, with suicide, murder, rape, drug abuse, domestic violence, and a sex scene set in a cemetery with more grotesque detail than necessary. The humor is dry and darkly comical and the characters, instead of being inherently black or white, were grey and muddled. They had a hidden agenda of their own, and they were more in-tune with what an actual human is like than any fictional character out there. If this book was written by someone, say a unknown author by the name of KJ Ingrowl, I would not have looked twice at this book, and most readers would not have. It would also have not gotten the sales that it does. I see a lot of readers dismissing this off as bad because they see JK Rowling and want childhood again. It is not a bad book, but it comes off as sour grapes to most of its readers that are expecting the magical world of Harry Potter, but are instead greeted by too much information on private lives and normalcy.