It is only natural that the first book that J.K. Rowling writes after her insanely popular Harry Potter series, would become a bestseller even before it was release. This is such the case with The Casual Vacancy, yet does that mean that it is actually any good?
The answer is a resounding kinda. While the writing is still of the quality that one expects from Rowling, she might have done her job a little too well while describing the life of a quiet English town. The novel revolves around the lives of several members of the quaint village of Pagford as they all deal with the various and far-reaching ways that the are affected by the sudden death of Parish Councillor, Barry Fairbrother. It does not have the immediate whiz-bang of a world of wizards, and sometimes, certainly within the first fifty pages, that is a type of excitement is sorely missed.
The problem being that when you set out to a novel about a small town where you would expect nothing much to happen, it is easily for nothing much to happen and bore your readers. Now of course no writer of the modern age, and certainly one of Rowling’s calibur is going to stay at only the point of what you expected and not unveil what is truly going on in the supposedly small lives of those that live in this small town.
Later into the book as the lives of the characters intersect in interesting way and secrets are unveiled the book takes a nice shape and the reader is not disappointed. If it only were not for those blandness of those first fifty pages that the reader has to fight their way through this would be a much more celebrated book.
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