I took a very long time to get into this book. Two hundred pages in I was still getting muddled between Shirley and Samantha, Colin and Gavin, and I still wasn't hooked. I did persist however, and things improved. This is a saga of small-town life worthy of Trollope or Dickens. Characters from every walk of life in this fairly idyllic little town get a part in the drama. Every one is a stereotype (working class slapper with a heart of gold; doughty, boring, conscientious teacher with no fashion sense; nasty, sadistic type who terrorises his wife and children - they're all here and more besides) and they're all pretty unlikeable. The drama that unfolds following the death of a councillor, as various factions jostle to get their candidate elected in the resulting by-election, is all too believable however. It's worth getting to the end to see how it all unfolds. But you may breathe a sigh of relief that you've actually made it there. ( )

If you liked Harry Potter, there is no guarantee you will enjoy this, because it is a completely different ballpark. The closest comparison I could make is Salem's Lot, because this book is fundamentally about a town.

Many, if not most of the characters we follow are not Good PeopleTM. They are extremely flawed, but Rowling crafts a compelling character-driven tale that makes you card about these people. The story takes a lot of dark turns and is not for the faint of heart, but if you are willing and able to tackle poverty, drug addiction, assault and abuse, death, and more - you just might find this a good read, as I did. ( )

Quite a soap opera. Almost every shocking thing you can imagine is shoved into this book. I liked up until the last two parts. ( )

Wow, Jo. This is hella grown up. Sex, drugs, rape, abuse, neglect, and local politics. All very sad topics. In a way, this novel reminded me of a nonfiction book I read years ago called [b:Random Family|385255|Random Family Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx|Adrian Nicole LeBlanc|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348194436s/385255.jpg|909535]. They're both about the causes and consequences of poverty, and how and why efforts to help the poor fail so often.

Of course, [b:Random Family|385255|Random Family Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx|Adrian Nicole LeBlanc|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348194436s/385255.jpg|909535] was entirely about poor people, but The Casual Vacancy is also about the middle class. This book's main villain is Howard Mollison, a hugely obese man who owns a successful shop and is the heavyweight(!) in the local political scene. I thought J.K. made him a little too detestable, but it was all leading up to a point that really hit home well, the scene where the fat man is decrying the public funds spent on helping drug addicts and the doctor points out that (with socialized medicine) public funding has also been spent on his obesity-related illnesses.

I think this may be a book written by a bleeding heart liberal for bleeding heart liberals, so as a huge Harry Potter fan and a super bleeding heart liberal, how could I not like it? I also love what I think of as gossipy books: books about the nitty gritty dirty realistic details of everyday ordinary lives--stuff like John Updike or Anne Tyler. Who's cheating on whom? Who seems happy but secretly hates their life? Stuff like that.

Another thing I liked about this book is that the story was balanced between the adult and teen world. I think that may be why the book was overlong. There are like 12 main characters, maybe six adults and six teens (now that I think about it, maybe more--Wikipedia lists 19 characters). As we saw in HP, Rowling is especially gifted at capturing the worldview of young people. In HP it was angsty but in TCV it was downright depressing. Teenagers are crazy. But also compelling. We were all that young and stupid once. Well, maybe not as stupid as Krystal or as sociopathic as Fats or as depressed as Sukhvinder, but maybe more like Andrew, who I thought of as a zitty version of Harry if he'd never been a wizard.

I would NOT recommend this to fans of Harry Potter, unless you also happen to be an adult who doesn't mind reading super depressing stories about how our civilization fails people on so many levels.

Still, I liked it. ( )

I had low expectations for this book for a number of reasons. As a fan of JKR's Potter books, I knew that anything not-Potter would inevitably feel like something of a letdown. For example, any time poor Patricia Cornwell writes any non-Scarpetta book, she gets roasted by her Scarpetta fans. Also, the reviews for this book were generally poor. Although my taste differs significantly from that of professional book snobs, um, *reviewers*, I find the aggregate user reviews on Goodreads and Audible to be generally in the ballpark. Finally, the reviews I read generally indicated that this book was dark and grim, with a downer of an ending. Had I not enjoyed the Potter world JKR built so much, I probably wouldn't have read this book at all.

Curiously, I had just been listening to Peyton Place on audio, and couldn't help but mentally compare the two. They are similar in theme - both are about the sordid realities hiding behind a small town's pretty facade, including the sort of small-town class politics and power struggles where the successful and unsympathetic fight with the successful and sympathetic over the town's civic responsibility to their "undeserving poor", as Alfred P Doolittle would say. I had the same difficulties at the start of the story, too. So many characters are introduced so rapidly that I simply couldn’t keep track of them all. This is a uniquely audio problem, because in a paper format, I’d be able to flip back and forth to remind myself what each character had been up to previously, until all the dots start connecting and the individual storylines come together.

I suppose the comparison to the Potter books is inevitable, but JKR is successful in repeating and improving on one of the things I loved about those books. The huge cast of characters is wonderfully drawn. Each character is unique, and each character is flawed in some way, and stays true to itself throughout the story arc. What she has improved upon in this adult book is that there is no clear division between the “good” characters and the “bad” characters. Even her most unlikeable characters have some positive qualities (or at least sympathetic ones, given their eventually revealed histories and situations), and we understand how those positive and negative qualities drive their actions. The characters come from all walks of life and all situations, from the congenitally wealthy to middle class to children of heroin addicts. Had the children’s books been written this way, I wouldn’t have wondered where the inhabitants of Knockturn Alley went to school, because they obviously weren’t at Hogwarts.

Many reviewers complained that the ending was too grim, but I have to disagree. There is tragedy at the end, but many characters have learned and grown from their experiences to varying degrees, and there is genuine hope for some at the end.

This is very much a character-driven story, to the degree that there seems to be very little plot at all. Halfway through the book, though I was enjoying the characters, I wondered if there was a point to the story. At the end, I can see the point. But anyone who prefers a story with some action driving toward a particular end will not be happy with this story. It’s really just about people and how they behave and think and interact with one another. It’s about how attitudes and prejudices create the kind of society we live in.

As I mentioned, I listened to this on audio. Tom Hollander read the story and did a fantastic job. Although he doesn’t attempt to create a unique voice for each character – that would have been nearly impossible with the number of characters – he read with feeling and I was easily able to distinguish one character’s speech from another. I enjoyed this very much, and may even possibly listen to it again sometime. ( )