J. K. Rowling, the author of The Casual Vacancy, is the creator of the Harry Potter series, seven books and eight films that children and other intelligent people have loved since they first came out. They are complex, impressive, entertaining, challenging. She asserts that The Casual Vacancy is very different from the Harry Potter series. The book’s protagonist is in many ways like Harry Potter, but he doesn’t have a wand, doesn’t go to Hogwarts, works to save a corner of a town instead of the whole world, and dies on page 8. That’s different from the Potter series. It is written for adults: it has sex, incest, rape, foul language, and other details that make it inappropriate for children. It is not a great book for simple escape. Compared to the Potter series, it is equally complex, more impressive, also entertaining, more challenging.
“About the Author” in The Casual Vacancy gives impressive statistics about the Potter series, and adds: “As well as an Order of the British Empire for services to children’s literature, J.K. Rowling is the recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees, including the Prince of Asturias Award for Concord, France’s Légion d’honneur, and the Hans Christian Andersen Award, and she has been a commencement speaker at Harvard University. She supports a wide number of causes and is the founder of Lumos, which works to transform the lives of disadvantaged children” (396).
Readers of the current book may want to know:
1. When she was a child, she lived in Winterbourne;
2. she attended St. Michael’s Primary School, a school with an extraordinary history;
3. she describes teen years as “a dreadful time of life”;
4. she admires Jessica Mitford;
5. she is Anglican, but refers to a Catholic to clarify: "like Graham Greene, my faith is sometimes about if my faith will return. It's important to me." She takes no responsibility for the lunatic fringes of her religion.
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