"The Casual Vacancy" a book review

J.K. Rowling's book "The Casual Vacancy" it a tough one for me to rate and review, in some ways it was a great and even an important book and in other ways I wish I'd never have read it. I posted a blog when I was about half way through the book saying it was about local politics, relationship politics and a lot of broken people, what I didn't realize at the time was that all these problems were really a set up to the real point of the story. For me the overall message of the book, and it is most definitely a message book, is that we get so caught up in the problems of our own lives, be they real or imagined, that we miss the bigger tragedies happening around us. It could also be viewed as a political statement about how people get caught in a cycle of poverty and abuse and how there are people who desperately need help to break that cycle. Good message, and very damning, I easily saw myself in the characters who turned a blind eye to the problems of others or who were to apathetic and self-centered to care. Rowling does a great job, as she did in the Harry Potter series, of drawing you into this world, introducing a large cast of characters and getting you to feel for them, by the time I got to the dramatic climax I could not put the book down, she is great at doing that. The characters themselves are all a bit stereotypical but even so Rowling doesn't let them become two dimensional, it's  like she took a stereotype skeleton and added flesh to it. The one character that really gets to come out of her stereotype, or at least that we get to see beyond it, is Krystal Weedon; it's her and her family that I believe are really the main characters in the book, everything comes back to them. Now here's where things get tough for me, good, important message, good storytelling, compelling but yet Rowling sets you up for a terrible heart break. I can imagine that the tragedy at the core of this novel was the first part she wrote and that all the rest was built up around it so that we could see characters quite literally so caught up in their own little worlds that they don't take the chance to avert calamity. I don't know if this book effects everyone the same, well of course it doesn't, but what I mean is I don't know if everyone gets as upset by it as I did. I cried, the last chapter was read with blurred vision and then afterward I sobbed and spent the next few days in a depressed emotional state. In a way that's another tribute to the writing that this fictional story could affect me so deeply but in another way it really sucks because I fight negative feelings enough already I don't need a work of fiction to bring me down. I've had a rough emotional week, due in large part to this story, so I'm torn on whether to say yes it's good you should read it, or to say avoid this at all costs. Either way I know I'm not likely to forget this book anytime soon, the Weedons will haunt me for years to come.