“A powerful and protected writer risks getting things wrong. The magic simply isn’t there in ‘The Casual Vacancy.’ Indeed, the spell has been broken.” It was her ability to create unforgettable characters and weave stories that held us captive. Rather, it is little more than a backdrop, a stage set, its lack of depth an emblem of Rowling’s inability to engage us, to invest us sufficiently in her characters, young or otherwise, to reckon with the contrivances of her fictional world.” “Rowling clearly knows how to create a universe that’s compelling, consuming even, but Pagford is no such place. Even with its moments of humor, it’s a hard story where some people just don’t get saved, because really, they never had a chance.” “This isn’t a book that’s easy to fall in love with, the way Harry Potter was with its charming, winning hero and his plucky friends, saving the world from evil with the help of a powerful spell or two.
“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.” One character, we are told, “hated sudden death”. No one, I suspect, reads Rowling for the beauty of her sentences but there is often a sense here that the language is not quite doing what she wants it to do. “Generally, though, ‘The Casual Vacanc’y is a solid, traditional and determinedly unadventurous English novel. No amount of Reparo spells can undo the things that are done we’re not in Hogwarts anymore.” “In this one 500-page book, Rowling re-traverses the Potter series’ entire tonal journey: a gradual darkening in which snide comments on small stakes give way to sharp commentary on big ones.
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