Saturday, September 29, 2012

The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling

                                                             The Casual Vacancy
                                                                 by J K Rowling


( Contains some spoilers)


I should probably start with the fact that this book was nothing like I thought it was going to be.
I imagined that it was going to be a murder mystery of an important village member of the council. Ha!!! It was not a murder mystery ! After I learned that I got on with finding out what it was about.

Barry Fairbrother dies suddenly which very quickly sends the entire town into a crazed comical state of shock. We do quite quickly learn that he was a pretty great guy , and tried to help people out a lot.
With his death comes opportunity for many in the village to possibly shove on their own personal wants.His death effected a huge amount of people directly and indirectly. As with the Harry Potter books J K Rowling writes great characters . There is a huge amount of them in this book as the story goes between many families in the village as we get to be almost" fly's on the wall" watching the goings on of all the residents here. Behind each door in the town are secrets and shame, dodgy people  , and down right bad people!!!

A number of the characrters got under my skin none more so then Krystal and her brother Robbie. This particular families story had my eyes welling up with tears at the end .I will not go into why but it is heartbreaking in so many ways. More so as you can imagine there are families  in real life out there going through a lot of the same problems.

The lives of most of the characters are intertwined as you would expect from small town life and each families secrets do not remain hidden for long. Since Barry's death all the secrets and lies are all coming out of the woodwork ,and with that comes all sorts of problems.

There is often content in the book that would not be suitable for children but for the adult admirers of  J K 's previous books this might be a pleasant return to her writings in a very different way.
I was very surprised by just how different this book is!!! That being said I did enjoy it in a different way,  when I finished it I was left with a feeling of contentment with it as a story. Much different then the Harry Potter books which no doubt will get compared to this, but a great story,  told well , and in a way that my fingers were almost smoking from turning the pages so quickly.
If this is a taste of what we can look forward to from this wonderful author  in the future then I say get scribbling Miss Rowling!!!!,

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