I was given this book by my mother, who only managed to read part of it before giving up angrily, declaring it was too depressing. It probably is, but I really enjoyed it, nonetheless. At least until the end, it's incredibly realistic, and depicts the everyday tragedies that are constantly happening around us. For me, Krystal Weedon's relationship with her mother was really familiar, reminiscent of my mother at her worst (which, I suspect, is the real reason she couldn't finish the book). There's a ton of unhappy marriages, parents who regret having their kids, small-minded small-town small businessmen who are callous enough to think that cutting off drug addicts (and their entire families) from any kind of help or resources is a good idea, and so it goes. It's an exercise in showing the world as it really is, rather than as we might wish it would be.

I did have some issues with it. Mostly, I didn't like the ending very much.

It seemed like the characterisation, which had been impeccable thus far, suddenly went a bit off. It's hard to believe that Krystal left her toddler brother to go wandering off near a river – she's certainly not shown as having perfect judgement, but better judgement than that, I'd think, no matter how desperate she is to get pregnant so she can escape her hellish living conditions – for that very brother's sake! And as well, much as I despised her, Shirley never seemed like the husband-murdering type, and the image of her prowling the streets of Pagford with an Epi-Pen clutched in her hand seemed a bit far-fetched. In neither case did these characters start acting hugely OOC, but they did a bit.

It just made the conclusion seem a bit melodramatic and contrived, although I wouldn't say it was rushed, at least.

The other thing that bothered me was the pronunciation respelling in the Weedons' (and co's) dialogue... even words that they were pronouncing as per the standard, like "could" (which became "cud") and "was" ("wuz"). I'm generally opposed to writers doing this to begin with – it usually comes across as patronising, and while I don't think it does here due to Rowling's obvious sympathy for the Weedons, I do think it did when she used the same technique for Hagrid in Harry Potter. Furthermore, it's unnecessary. These characters' speech patterns differed from what might be considered "neutral" English – lots of use of "ain't", double negatives and the particle "right?" tacked on at the end of sentences, for a start. Just as an example, the sentence, "But I ain't done nothing wrong, right?" would convey the accent just as well as "Bu' I ain' done nuffin' wrong, righ'?" which is what this text probably would have preferred. Also, Rowling did this (changed the speech patterns but not the spelling) for Andrew Price's dialogue, who it seems spoke much the same way as the Weedons, and in places it got really hard to read. Mostly when Terri was speaking, which probably evokes how hard her slurred speech would have been to understand in person anyway, but still, overall the technique irritated me.

On a slightly related note, the book also has a few sections where multiple paragraph are enclosed within parentheses, and it seems like this was hard to edit because there were also a few spots where there was a closing parenthesis at the end of a paragraph with no pair that I could find. The writing feels a bit casual, but that doesn't bother me, just the apparent lack of editing.

Still, all in all, I loved this book. I wouldn't say it's slow, but a lot of the "action" is characters bickering with each other, so if you have no patience for that this book probably isn't for you. It's not usually my thing either, but I found the characters here so compelling that it worked. I really, really recommend it, and I find it kind of sad that its rating on Goodreads is so low just because of all the Harry Potter fans who read it and had their delicate sensibilities wounded by swearing and frank depictions of sex. I like Harry Potter, but this is a completely different kind of book, and yeah. It worked for me.