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That characterization informs the pleasure of reading the Robert Galbraith books, much of which comes from watching Strike be cooler and smarter than everyone around him, even as he fights against his own inner demons. Strike is a Humphrey Bogart-ish noir detective (he’s nearly always right, nearly always unflappable, and nearly always the coolest person in the room), put through the mildest of Everyman filters (but also he is fat). Rowling, but I know she loves Cormoran Strike The Casual Vacancy is a slog, but the three published Robert Galbraith books are playful in a way that the first few Harry Potter books are playful: They giddily romp their way through gritty, sordid murder mysteries, unabashedly reveling in the tortured cool-guy mystique of detective Cormoran Strike. “Being Robert Galbraith has been such a liberating experience! It has been wonderful to publish without hype or expectation and pure pleasure to get feedback from publishers and readers under a different name.” “I hoped to keep this secret a little longer,” Rowling said in a statement. The anonymous tipster, it developed, was a friend of the wife of the lawyer who handled the deal. Rowling, they said, and no one at her publishing house had known who she was when they accepted the book. He sent the book to two independent linguistics computer experts, who found multiple similarities between Cuckoo’s Calling, The Casual Vacancy, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and he found that The Cuckoo’s Calling and The Casual Vacancy shared both an agent and an editor.Īt last Brooks sent his suspicions along to the publisher, and they confirmed everything. “I said, ‘Nobody who was in the Army and now works in civilian security could write a book as good as this,’” he told the New York Times. Times arts editor Richard Brooks decided to investigate the tip.
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… It’s her pseudonym – promise its true.” Knight had tweeted about how much she was enjoying the novel, and the tipster wrote, “Written by JK Rowling. Then, in July of 2015, an anonymous figure tweeted a tip to Sunday Times of London columnist India Knight. The market was not, it seemed, clamoring for gritty noir detective novels by an ex-British Army officer named Robert Galbraith. It was critically admired - described as “scintillating” and “sparkling,” so “instantly compelling” that “it’s hard to believe this is a debut novel” - but it sold only 1,500 copies in the UK. When The Cuckoo’s Calling came out in May of 2015, it languished in gentle obscurity for months. J.K Rowling’s Cormoran Strike books spent months as a secret
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And for me, that book and the series that followed would become the closest thing there was to a Harry Potter series for adults. Rowling book out, a book for grownups, and it had been out for months without anyone knowing it. Then, in 2013, the news broke: There was a new J.K. A year went by without any whisper of a new novel from Rowling, and I didn’t especially want one. Maybe, I thought, she was only good at her one thing, and that was fine she’d written one of the most popular series of books in the world, so she had nothing to prove, and after all I would always have the Harry Potter books. The Casual Vacancy effectively dulled my appetite for grownup books from J.K. This book is a snooze, and what’s worse, it’s striving desperately to feel important.
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There is no murder and no magic anywhere. The death is entirely natural the election is petty and uninteresting the characters are all secretly terrible in a flat and dutiful sort of way.
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Like the Harry Potter books, The Casual Vacancy is doorstopper-length, but unlike the Harry Potter books, it lacks narrative tension: The book’s central question is how to fill a vacant council seat in a small and close-minded village after the former occupant’s death. It’s gritty and literary in a self-conscious way there’s a description of a used condom lying outside “like a slug” that reads as very, “That’s right, I said CONDOM, this is a world with SEX in it, sorry to BLOW YOUR MINDS.” That 2012 novel was The Casual Vacancy, which is in all honesty not a very good book. I could experience adulthood with Rowling’s characters the way I had experienced adolescence. Rowling’s characters were with me for every milestone of my childhood and adolescence - so when Rowling began to publish novels for adults in 2012, when I was 23, I was delighted. I was 8 when Sorcerer’s Stone came out in the US 20 years ago, and I was in college when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out in 2007. Rowling’s seven-book saga was getting to age with the characters. For the generation who grew up with Harry Potter, part of the joy of J.K.
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