The Casual Vacancy

J.K. Rowling's first book for adults, I think a more accurate title would be Every Dysfunction You Can Think Of.

The plot is supposed to be about a councilman in a small British town dies and an election has to be held to pick a replacement. In execution, however, it's really a framing device for a lot of characters to have experiences. The election is wrapped up with plenty of pages left.

The amount of characters made my brain break at the beginning. There's a snobby family scheming to get the husband elected, an uptight deputy headmaster with a caring wife and a nihilistic son, a man who abuses his wife and sons, a woman with a heroin addiction and a teenage daughter who is practically raising her brother, a man who hates his girlfriend but is in love with the widow, and all this other stuff. I was overwhelmed when the book started, and by the end I was still sketchy on some of them.

Very little is resolved. In fact, it really seemed that only half the story for a lot of these characters was told. I wanted to see how Fats reacted to his mistakes, or Simon to finding out his son sold him out, or Gaia and Kay's relationship now that Gavin's out of it, or Sookvenda's actions to her mother discovering her self-mutilation. Every subplot feels like it could have been it's own book.

Are you seeing the pattern? Too many characters. This is a doorstopper book, but it still seems half-finished. In Harry Potter, it worked, because there was seven books to tell the tale. Here, there's too much too soon. And all the darkness... again, it works through seven books, but here it's just heaped on you all the time. There's little in happy moments.