First let me say that I am a huge…I’m talking HUGE Harry Potter fan and that I hold J.K. Rowling in the highest esteem for creating such a wonderful and exciting world. Unfortunately, her world building isn’t so much in A Casual Vacancy.
Rowling’s first turn into adult books leaves me…disappointed. The book tries its hardest to remain relevant to adults, but fails by having all the conflict brought on by teenagers. I think Rowling still misses the teenage world, and I hope she returns to her roots.
Vacancy is chocked full of characters – way too many to keep track of – and the biggest problem is that you can’t really tell whose story it is. Point of views change at a blink of an eye – sometimes mid sentence. That doesn’t bother me as much as not really caring about any of the characters, even though the circumstances of the characters should be worth caring about.
Drug addiction, infidelity, political intrigue – yeah it sounds like ABC’s REVENGE, right? At least that show is so bad it’s good. Vacancy lacks a true direction and makes the reader work really hard for very little in return. Its full of weird sentences like, “it fluttered in her stomach like a fetus.” Eck.
Where is the lovely alliteration? What happened to lines like, “Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.”
That’s what I’m talking about…and miss.