I've finished it now, thanks to an appalling cold that sent me to bed with the cat.
It's not very good - my first instinct is that it wouldn't have made it into print without the author's name on the front. I can't detail without outing myself, but all I can say is that when the main selling point of a book is the author's name, the least one can do for the paying public is hire someone who can write, ie someone else, to create the text. That hasn't happened - that's the first instance I can think of in book publishing, too, except Iris Murdoch's last book that was famously written when she had Alzheimers.
The story is, as everyone knows, about a local council election and its effect on various families in Smalltown Village, West Countrrreee.
The council election raises temperatures all round but it's not much to with the the real theme of the book, bad parents - from the adopted kid who wasn't wanted by dad to the beaten sons of maniac above to the local crack whore's flailing and terrified chaos victims.
But first, I have to point out that the only outstanding feature of the book is that it's full of typos and reps, noticeable even to someone like me who is used to overlooking these things in raw typescripts. They stick out so much they're irritating and confusing - one character is only ever introduced as "Fat, plain...", but when you get to page 500 you kind of know that already. And think author is introducing a new character, proudly using two of the ten adjectives she knows.
(Thinks JKR must be hyper-stroppy and tough - no editor lets that out unless they're terrorised. See below for the worst non-edited slip, the one that blows the plot out of the water.)
None of the characters is very nice. So there's no empathy or drive to get to the end of the book. They represent one fault each, and each fault is just repeated stoutly every 50 pp through all 500 pages. There's no insight or development into say, the deli owner's smalltown snobbery, or the local maniac's wife beating. All the snobbery is really out of date 70s-style, too: skirts jeered at for being above the knee, etc, other skirts look 'like hessian'.
The non-ghastly characters are there as props - you get nothing, say, of the beaten wife's interior monologue. Or how Ms Fat, Plain feels about not being Miss World. The 'social comment' JKR makes is limited to 'wife beating is bad'- You don't say.
What gets me is that all the 'children' in the book, while universal victims, are not very nice themselves and have zero insight into what's going on around them. OK, victims aren't always nice people, and that's fine, but most abused children don't turn nasty - mostly because they're too frightened. Some cope, some get out, and some flail silently. Some survive unscathed, which is what I have always found the most interesting, but this possibility is not allowed.
The social comment, which is like being smacked over the head with a hammer, is beyond obvious. And FACTUALLY INCORRECT. The plotline of crack whore's teen DD Krystal trying to get pregnant so she can get a flat, while about the only character-driven development in all 500pp, couldn't happen in today's England. She would have known all she would get is a fostering with baby, and we are told she hated being fostered. The book is supposed to be about today's England.
I did enjoy the crack whore house of heroin strand, felt mildly illuminated with Krystal's story and very sorry for her. Krystal the Krack Khaos Kid was the only mildly empathetic character - nothing you couldn't have got from Dispatches on C4 in 5 min tho'.
All in all, a curiosity piece - you won't be enlightened or entertained. But you will hope the book makes enough money to subsidise a state of the nation novel set in this century without howlers.