Showing posts with label The Casual Vacancy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Casual Vacancy. Show all posts

Tuesday 18 December 2012

The Casual Vacancy Review

Good girl gone bad-

Take three-

Action.

No clouds in my storms...

Let it rain, I hydroplane into fame

Comin' down with the Dow Jones...




I've just finished reading JK Rowling's 'The Casual Vacancy'. I cried. Not ashamed to admit it. This book shook me to my core. It was like reading the inner-most thoughts of my friends, neighbors and fellow small-town residents. It's a simple concept, really: one man dies, leaving a small town without a Parish Councillor. But it's so much more than that. It's about class systems and abuse and the terrible things we do to one another.

I read intently as the little town of Pagford played like a day-in-the-life of all those people in the world, with their little hang ups, their damages, and their pain. I didn't identify with a single character. No, not one. I saw buried within these works of fiction parts of myself. I couldn't stop thinking as I plowed on through this novel, I am everyone of them and none of them. JK doesn't just write silly characters and great jokes, she writes human beings. Real, broken, human's who have all found their own manner of dealing with the world around them. 

If there was a message in all this, it wasn't wasted on me. Trouble is, I didn't feel like a message was being shoved down my throat....no, it crept up on me, like a lurking, horrible realization. These people aren't evil, just people, and if it takes something akin to the events of this book to make the little minds of this world we live in to stir from their self imposed slumber, then consider me terrified.

Pick this up. It's about all of us.

Until I stop having feels, I remain

frogoat

p.s. I realize it's neither a comic nor my usual spiel. Just check it out, you won't regret it.