The Casual Vacancy
by J. K. Rowling
- Percentage of approved critics who have given this book a positive review.
Critic Rating
45%
Critic Reviews: 21
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- User rating from iDreamBooks & iTunes
Reader Rating
63%
Reader Ratings: 3990
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Synopsis
A big novel about a small town...When Barry Fairbrother dies in his early forties, the 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... more
About J. K. Rowling
- All Critics: 21
- Positive: 10
- Negative: 11
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The Guardian | 26 Sep 2012
The plot is often predictable; it requires a large helping of artificial contrivance; and it lurches into melodrama in the final act.
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The New York Times | 27 Sep 2012
What’s missing here is an emotional depth of field. It’s not just because the stakes in this novel are so much smaller...It’s that the characters in “The Casual Vacancy” feel so much less fully imagined than the ones in the Harry Potter epic.
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The Telegraph | 28 Sep 2012
The big emotional chords Rowling clearly intends to strike don’t resonate quite as much as they should, and some of her analogies are very peculiar...It’s also too long.
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Time | 27 Sep 2012
The Casual Vacancy is a different beast entirely...It’s a big, ambitious, brilliant, profane, funny, deeply upsetting and magnificently eloquent novel of contemporary England, rich with literary intelligence and entirely bereft of bullshit
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USA Today | 27 Sep 2012
Rowling lets her agenda drive not just the plot but the characters. The ones who come alive are those sympathetic to "the Fields," i.e., liberals. Those who criticize the residents, i.e., conservatives, are cliched variations of Harry Potter's Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia.
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The Daily Beast | 27 Sep 2012
One thing that hasn’t changed: she still knows how to write an insanely compelling page-turner.
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Entertainment Weekly | 27 Sep 2012
The Casual Vacancy piles on the unpleasantness — not just smack and tawdry sex, but also rape, child abuse, self-mutilation, suicide, pedophilia, and mental illness. It’s all just too much: When the novel finally arrives at its predictable and heavy-handed ending, what started as a lively comedy of manners has turned into an overwrought slog
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Parade | 27 Sep 2012
The Casual Vacancy isn't just unblinking about the sordid side of life. It's almost gleefully clinical in cataloguing the worst impulses of humankind, and at bringing us into the heads of bigoted, vituperative locals ruled by tradition, spite, and envy. It's Dickensian in its contempt for corrupt people and institutions, and it comes on like narrative napalm.
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Los Angeles Times | 26 Sep 2012
Rowling too is casually cruel to her characters, giving them problems they can't surmount and then turning their lives from bad to worse, like John Irving in overdrive. Is this a failure of the imagination? Maybe. Rowling clearly knows how to create a universe that's compelling, consuming even, but Pagford is no such place.
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The Washington Post | 27 Sep 2012
There were incidents I immediately reread because the developments were surprising or genuinely moving. There were characters that I liked, then disliked, then liked again with reservations.
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People | 27 Sep 2012
Rowling captures the humanity in everyone, even if that humanity is not always a pretty sight. And – though creating Harry Potter was more than enough – if Rowling wants to convince the world that she can cast other spells, she has succeeded
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Newsday | 28 Sep 2012
with its realistic, intense teenage characters, its obsession with hypocrisy and its progressive ideals, the book is a natural for sophisticated high school readers, and other connoisseurs of dark social satire.
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Hypable | 26 Sep 2012
The Casual Vacancy is a clear departure for Rowling. She has proven she can write outside the world of fantasy children’s novels and show us a world that is gritty and real.
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Tampa Bay Times | 28 Sep 2012
In The Casual Vacancy, she sails right into those sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking hinterlands. It's a trip worth making.
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NY Daily News | 25 Sep 2012
Rowling’s strength was never her prose. It was her ability to create unforgettable characters and weave stories that held us captive. The magic simply isn’t there in “The Casual Vacancy.” Indeed, the spell has been broken.
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The Wall Street Journal | 27 Sep 2012
Once you get your Mileses and Simonses straight and events begin to unfurl, it becomes a positively propulsive read. "The Casual Vacancy" may not be George Eliot, but it's J.K. Rowling; and that's pretty good.
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The Globe and Mail | 27 Sep 2012
...a mishmash of cardboard characters, a convoluted yet preposterous plot, cartoonish marital discord, paralyzing generational divides, transparent conspiracies, an epidemic of personality disorders, and stereotypical conflicts...
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The New York Times | 26 Oct 2012
A thoughtful edit might have removed many of the stylistic slippages...there might have been a good, possibly even great, 300-page social novel inside the 500-page tear-jerker we have instead. Let’s hope it will be different next time.
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The Star | 23 Nov 2012
Though the novel doesn’t live up to the hype (what could?), it is far from a face-plant, and shows that Rowling can do just fine without wizard or wand in sight.
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The Guardian | 29 Sep 2012
One mark of Rowling's determination to get to the nerve of reality in this book is her vigorous use of industrial language. Fs are everywhere, Cs are not withheld. But it never feels gratuitous.
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The Guardian | 28 Sep 2012
...the narrative requires a fair amount of artificial contrivance, is a little a predictable, and lurches into melodrama in the final straight...
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By Nathalie 16 Feb 2013
