Itinerantdaughter's Blog

Was it patently obvious to anyone else that J.K. Rowling’s book for grown-ups was bound to fail?

“It’s easy to understand why Ms. Rowling wanted to try something totally different after spending a decade and a half inventing and complicating the fantasy world that Harry and company inhabited, and one can only admire her gumption in facing up to the overwhelming expectations created by the global phenomenon that was Harry Potter. Unfortunately, the real-life world she has limned in these pages is so willfully banal, so depressingly clichéd that “The Casual Vacancy” is not only disappointing — it’s dull. The novel — which takes place in the tiny, fictional English village of Pagford, and chronicles the political and personal fallout created by the sudden death of a member of the parish council named Barry Fairbrother — reads like an odd mash-up of a dark soap opera like “Peyton Place” with one of those very British Barbara Pym novels, depicting small-town, circumscribed lives.”

–– In the Times by… guess who?

This entry was posted on September 27, 2012 at 7:53 pm and is filed under Conspiracy Theories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.