I felt a little rebellious when I decided I was going to read this book since I had heard it was so inappropriate. So when I started reading I kept thinking Okay, this is gonna get worse, just keep that in mind.

And did it? No. Not in my mind at least.

Then again, I read Los Cachorros and novels/stories like it when I was in Elementary School/High School. I'm not affected by swear words and vulgar language in print (and even less in English since it's not my native language so I didn't know that "bad words" were bad until I had to learn they were. I watched movies and listened to songs and unless I looked it up or someone pointed it out to me, I didn't know what was a swear word so I'd use it. Sometimes I still have trouble with what I should(n't) say. Ask my husband.)

I went through the first 200 pages feeling like I had decided to start the book so I needed to finish it, no matter how boring and way too detailed (setting not content-wise) it became. And then around page 200, I started caring about the town. Krystal's story was the first one that caught my attention fully and I read just to find out more about her life, but without realizing it, and once I got all my characters straight (there are so many!), I actually wanted to know what would happen to all of them.

The people are bad. I don't think there was anyone I truly liked, except Robbie (bless his heart), and Gaia and Sukhvinder were okay I guess. But the marriages, the couples... No one had a good solid marriage and that was kind of a downer. I don't live for HEA endings but I like having something happy at least, like a small ray of hope, not necessarily in the ending.

The book has some political issues that even though at first I just skimmed through, later in the story, I started giving them more and more thought and there were some good points shown. My dad grew up in a small neighborhood in Peru and his family was really really poor, so some of the issues related to poverty kind of hit home for me.

Oh, I guess I should mention that I thought that the sexual scenes/descriptions were a lot more manageable than I was expecting. Nothing that made me think I needed to put the book down and never pick it up again. (If you had read the books they made me read in High School... Look up Mario Vargas Llosa, famous Peruvian writer, awesome (but quite vulgar) books.) And I'm not going to lie, the F-word is everywhere.

I thought it was a very well-written book. Good character development, even though, like I previously mentioned, they were not likable people. Great insight into human nature. Maybe that's why I didn't like many of the characters, because their stories make the world seem like a bad place in which good things sometimes happen. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that is actually very true.

In my opinion, this is a very sad but eye-opening story, with a sad ending, which I loved.

The Casual Vacancy - Likewise Book Reviews

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