Reuters Reports Various Comments from Newspapers and Critics

Reuters has released statements on The Casual Vacancy from various official sources:

“Unfortunately, the real-life world she has limned in these pages is so willfully banal, so depressingly cliched that ‘The Casual Vacancy’ is not only disappointing ” it’s dull.” (New York Times)

“The Casual Vacancy is no masterpiece, but it’s not bad at all: intelligent, workmanlike, and often funny,” said Theo Tait in the Guardian newspaper.

Andrew Losowsky of the Huffington Post website, said Rowling’s foray into adult fiction was worth publishing, but perhaps did not match the giddy anticipation surrounding its release.

“Would this book be published if it weren’t for the name on the cover? Almost certainly. Would anyone pay much attention to it, and its message? Probably not.” (Huffington Post)

“Though some sequences feel a few drafts short of being ready, others are written with a fluency and beauty that suggest that there could be more and better works to come from her pen.” (Huffington Post)

In The Independent newspaper, Boyd Tonkin believed Rowling was at her best when describing the younger characters.

“The teens of Winterdown belong in a bolder, richer book than some of the parental caricatures,” he said. “All the social and hormonal turbulence that the later Potter volumes had to veil in the euphemisms of fantasy appear in plain sight here.” (The Independent)

The conservative Daily Telegraph broadsheet took umbrage at Rowling’s skewering of the middle class.

“While Rowling gives due respect to the poorer, damaged characters, higher up the social scale she is busy carving grotesques,” wrote Allison Pearson in a three-star review. (The Daily Telegraph)

The rest of the article can be read here.