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A review by justliketitanium
The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling
Did not finish book. Stopped at 8%.
This review is based on messages I sent to my best friends group chat live-blogging the book.
I knew from the start that I was going to hate-read this book. For context, I was a huge Harry Potter fan during my tween and teen years, and intended to read The Causal Vacancy when it was first published but never got around to it. In the years since, I began to look at the quality of J.K. Rowling’s writing more critically (the last few Harry Potter books suffered badly from a lack of editing in my opinion), and also read a lot discussions about the misogyny, transphobia, fatphobia, and racism evident in her writing on my corner of the internet. And that was before she revealed herself to be a huge TERF and doubled- and tripled-down on doing untold harm to trans people using her enormous international platform. So I figured this book wasn’t worth my time, but I found it by the side of the road and was still curious about it.
I stalled out for several days after reading only the first chapter, and when I got going again I found many scenes introducing characters, and (almost) everyone was horrible. My favourite character at that point was a teenage boy full of seething rage towards his abusive father. Perhaps I could have gotten hooked by needing to know what happened to one of the characters, which is why I read so much of the Cormoran Strike series, but I do not trust JKR to provide a satisfying character arc.
JKR kind of writes like a man. I get the sense that she takes giddy delight in writing that could be described as “normal,” “gritty,” “real,” or “base,” which I remember appealing to me when I started reading the Cormoran Strike books four years ago, but now it just makes me roll my eyes.... I’ve grown since then.
I don’t think she actually likes any of these characters. Which isn’t necessarily bad in and of itself, but combined with everything else is tiresome. They all seem to be described with thinly veiled contempt. There was a description of a fat character that was particularly awful.
I was starting to see that she was setting up a narrative about how interconnected everyone's lives can be in a small community, but it was almost certainly not worth enduring the horrible people she put on paper to satisfy any curiosity I had about that, and especially not worth enduring her unkind descriptions of women and girls. She does write like a man, by which I mean awful guy-in-your-MFA-style male gazey prose.
I decided to stop reading on page 41 of 503. It was the description of the frumpy guidance teacher (who “hardly ever looked at herself in full-length mirrors, and boycotted shops where this was unavoidable,”) that did me in. Damn, Jo, a lady can’t care about her appearance but she certainly can’t not care about her appearance either, am I getting that right? Oh but I’m sure there’s an exact right amount for a woman to care about her appearance. One of my friends had pointed out that JKR seems to have intense internalized misogyny, and I have to agree.
I knew from the start that I was going to hate-read this book. For context, I was a huge Harry Potter fan during my tween and teen years, and intended to read The Causal Vacancy when it was first published but never got around to it. In the years since, I began to look at the quality of J.K. Rowling’s writing more critically (the last few Harry Potter books suffered badly from a lack of editing in my opinion), and also read a lot discussions about the misogyny, transphobia, fatphobia, and racism evident in her writing on my corner of the internet. And that was before she revealed herself to be a huge TERF and doubled- and tripled-down on doing untold harm to trans people using her enormous international platform. So I figured this book wasn’t worth my time, but I found it by the side of the road and was still curious about it.
I stalled out for several days after reading only the first chapter, and when I got going again I found many scenes introducing characters, and (almost) everyone was horrible. My favourite character at that point was a teenage boy full of seething rage towards his abusive father. Perhaps I could have gotten hooked by needing to know what happened to one of the characters, which is why I read so much of the Cormoran Strike series, but I do not trust JKR to provide a satisfying character arc.
JKR kind of writes like a man. I get the sense that she takes giddy delight in writing that could be described as “normal,” “gritty,” “real,” or “base,” which I remember appealing to me when I started reading the Cormoran Strike books four years ago, but now it just makes me roll my eyes.... I’ve grown since then.
I don’t think she actually likes any of these characters. Which isn’t necessarily bad in and of itself, but combined with everything else is tiresome. They all seem to be described with thinly veiled contempt. There was a description of a fat character that was particularly awful.
I was starting to see that she was setting up a narrative about how interconnected everyone's lives can be in a small community, but it was almost certainly not worth enduring the horrible people she put on paper to satisfy any curiosity I had about that, and especially not worth enduring her unkind descriptions of women and girls. She does write like a man, by which I mean awful guy-in-your-MFA-style male gazey prose.
I decided to stop reading on page 41 of 503. It was the description of the frumpy guidance teacher (who “hardly ever looked at herself in full-length mirrors, and boycotted shops where this was unavoidable,”) that did me in. Damn, Jo, a lady can’t care about her appearance but she certainly can’t not care about her appearance either, am I getting that right? Oh but I’m sure there’s an exact right amount for a woman to care about her appearance. One of my friends had pointed out that JKR seems to have intense internalized misogyny, and I have to agree.