The Casual Vacancy
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3.7 • 2.8K Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
When Barry Fairweather dies unexpectedly in his early forties, the little town of Pagford is left in shock.
Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war.
Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils...Pagford is not what it first seems.
And the empty seat left by Barry on the town's council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity and unexpected revelations?
Blackly comic, thought-provoking and constantly surprising, The Casual Vacancy is J.K. Rowling's first novel for adults.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
As huge Harry Potter fans, we weren’t sure what to expect from J.K. Rowling’s first novel for adults, but the bestselling author doesn’t disappoint. The Casual Vacancy takes a caustically funny deep dive beneath the surface of a seemingly idyllic English village. When a spot opens up on Pagford’s town council, the hamlet’s residents bare their fangs, exposing dangerous ambitions and hidden passions. Playing with a broad, interwoven cast of characters, Rowling delivers a dark and entertaining tale of love, lust, back-stabbing, jealousy, and class warfare. Throughout it all, Rowling’s compassion for her highly imperfect subjects shines through.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
On the face of it, Rowling's first adult book is very different from the Harry Potter books that made her rich and famous. It's resolutely unmagical: the closest thing to wizardry is the ability to hack into the amateurish Pagford Parish Council Web site. Instead of a battle for worldwide domination, there's a fight over a suddenly empty seat on that Council, the vacancy of the title. Yet despite the lack of invisibility cloaks and pensieves, Pagford isn't so different from Harry's world. There's a massive divide between the haves and the have-nots the residents of the Fields, the council flats that some want to push off onto a neighboring county council. When Councilor Barry Fairbrother born in Fields but now a middle-class Pagforder dies suddenly, the fight gets uglier. In tiny Pagford, and at its school, which caters to rich and poor alike, everyone is connected: obstreperous teenager Krystal Weedon, the sole functioning member of her working-class family, hooks up with the middle-class son of her guidance counselor; the social worker watching over Krystal's drug-addled mother dates the law partner of the son of the dead man's fiercest Council rival; Krystal's great-grandmother's doctor was Fairbrother's closest ally; the daughters of the doctor and the social worker work together, along with the best friend of Krystal's hookup; and so on. Rowling is relentlessly competent: all these people and their hatreds and hopes are established and mixed together. Secrets are revealed, relationships twist and break, and the book rolls toward its awful, logical climax with aplomb. As in the Harry Potter books, children make mistakes and join together with a common cause, accompanied here by adults, some malicious, some trying yet failing. Minus the magic, though, good and evil are depressingly human, and while the characters are all well drawn and believable, they aren't much fun.
Customer Reviews
In the Land of Muggle's and Gossip
Rowling's first book since finishing her Harry Potter series will more than sell a decent amount of copies but it is my belief that most of her pervious readers will be by and large disappointed with her first foray into reality. Though her prose has remained as enchanting as its expected to, her subject matter, though dark and certainly adult themed, is reduced to near fluff by gossip and overly staged conclusion.
It is also hard to ignore Rowling's bias as it's being shoved down your throat page after page. Her scenes, the one that comes to mind most frequently being that of a dinner party, are over drawn and not entertaining. It is onvios that her creative talents have been squashed by the Muggle world and the restrictions it imposes on her imagination.
That being said, Rowling has an uncommon ability to tap into the minds and lives of her characters to such a degree that come as fully formed humans leaping off of the page. Her ability to find and dig at a characters weaknesses is superb and is the only thing that saves this novel from being mere fluff.
As all her books to come will be, this is a must read for those of us who have grown up with her novels by our bedsides and in our dreams though I can only hope that in the future, should the wizarding world be locked away for good, she finds more magic in reality than she has conjured here.
Intriguing
I find it fascinating how people can be so narrow minded and so quick to judge a book before even reading it. Also if you don't like the price, don't buy it, but please don't give it one star because the rating should be based on the quality of the book, not the cheapness of the customer.
Guys, cool down!
I understand why you guys are attacking iBooks for the price, but rating 1star is not the way to go about it! Bad ratings should only be used for bad books, and you all know Rowling can't do that. If you're angry about the price, write iBooks. Don't attack a book by one of the best writers EVER when you haven't even read it!
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