It may only have hit shelves this morning, but JK Rowling's first foray into adult fiction is already dividing critics.
Allison Pearson, Daily Telegraph: "The Casual Vacancy, JK Rowling’s first adult novel, is sometimes funny, often startlingly well observed, and full of cruelty and despair."
Theo Tait, Guardian: "The new book contains regular outbursts of four-letter words, along with the memorable phrase 'that miraculously unguarded vagina' – which, leaked in a pre-publication profile, has caused a flurry of jokes on Twitter about Harry Potter and the Miraculously Unguarded Vagina. Generally, though, The Casual Vacancy is a solid, traditional and determinedly unadventurous English novel."
Jan Moir, Daily Mail: "The question is, can The Casual Vacancy ever live up to the hype? On balance, I would have to say no. Not unless you want to have more than 500 pages of relentless socialist manifesto masquerading as literature crammed down your throat."
Boyd Tonkin, Independent: "Rowling's writing can be laborious in set-pieces but picks up magic with the adolescent characters.”
Erica Wagner, Times: “Mass entertainment, in the 19th century, was elided with mass education: a confluence most perfectly and enduringly expressed by Charles Dickens, whose novels gave us privilege and penury, hope and abandonment of hope. We will never see his like again – and yet here is JK Rowling who, like Dickens, rose to fame and wealth from poverty. And she has, in The Casual Vacancy, taken it upon herself to revive the idea of the novel as a force for social good.”
Claire Allfree, Metro: “Rowling’s satirical potshots of English parochial conservatism are not exactly subtle and clichés abound. But, rather like Harry Potter, The Casual Vacancy is about adolescents doing battle with dangerous adults. Rowling has clearly set out to write an important book. A pity it should often feel so bland.”
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