Book Review: The Casual Vacancy

J.K. Rowling hit literary (and literal) gold when she wrote Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. The series made her world famous, and rightly so. Like many adults my age, I grew up reading the Harry Potter series, and never really stopped. Each book just got better and better, culminating in an epic battle that reinforced the major theme of Rowling's work: Love, above all else, is what makes life worth living. It makes us brave and kind. It gives us inner strength and moral character.
But the compassion Rowling displays time and again in her young adult novels is almost entirely absent in T...