Every book blog I follow is raptly covering the debut of J.K. Rowling's first novel to address wholly adult themes, The Casual Vacancy. Here's Michiko Kakutani's review in the New York Times (featuring, yes, a "limned.")

But I don't really understand the drive for people to cover this book like it's a sensation. Rowling has surely written one of the great young adult series of our time. And that's basically all that she's written. Why should this book, about something completely different, written in a completely different style, be treated like an automatic blockbuster? is it just because Rowling is now absurdly rich and very famous? Lightning will surely not strike twice, and it seems lazy and kind of ignorant to expect the same kind of successes—financial and literary—from this book. With all the great fiction coming out this fall (and it is a sorta-depressing truth that every week, I have to decide between two or three great new books for my section), it seems like a waste that all this energy is expended on a book that cannot possibly live up to whatever manufactured expectations are being built for it. But let's take it to the streets: