"Casual Vacancy" - pass the sick bag

If you want to find out about JK Rowling's new book "Casual Vacancy", Allison Pearson at the Telegraph has a comprehensive plot summary. This is useful because it has convinced me that it is one of those books I would throw angrily into the wastepaper basket part way through reading it. This passage in the article illustrates the attitude of the author:
When an interviewer from The New Yorker put it to Rowling that there might be strong objections to the idea of young Harry Potter readers being drawn into such material she replied coolly: "There is no part of me that feels that I represented myself as your children’s babysitter or their teacher… I’m a writer and I will write what I want to write."
There you have it. Essentially "I can do what the hell I want." Children will indeed read this horrible book, and be disturbed and confused by it. Perhaps the good that will come out of it is that some of the more intelligent child readers will begin to question what sort of world view was really working in the mind of the author of the Harry Potter books and the "spell" might be broken.

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