JK Rowling: 'The worst that can happen is that everyone says, That's shockingly bad'

[Matilda]

1. It isn't shockingly bad,

but it's not terribly good, either.

I was given my copy as a birthday present, and I'm rather glad I didn't shell out any money for it. I won't give away plot spoilers, but although the characters are well-drawn, they're uniformly unappealing, and it's very hard to care about most of them.

Half-way through the book, I realised I had a complete character description of the residents of an entire town, but very little had happened. And although said residents of said small village were all connected, each chapter dealt with a different family, so there was never the feeling of almost incestuous closeness amongst the families that occurs in small communities.

I wasn't tempted to put it aside, but kept reading in the hope that somewhere I would see a glimpse of the old Rowling touch, with a bit of excitement and perhaps a sudden devious plot twist. Nup - it just meandered on its way, and in the end my feeling was, "who cares?"

I couldn't help feeling that she was trying rather self-consciously not to write like the author of Harry Potter, but somehow the creative juices didn't break free of the restraints she was putting on herself. Or maybe she can only write about wizards after all.

On its own merits, it doesn't deserve the attention it's had, and I do wonder whether, if this book had been written by anyone other than Jo Rowling, it would have got published at all. At the very least, I think it would have sunk without a trace.