I am probably the only person on earth who hasn't read Harry Potter, so I was able to read this with no preconceptions. Of course, any other author would not have been able to publish a book about, horror, local politics, but stepping away from that, it's a good novel. I like books about people's lives and communities. There were some very clunky bits that should have been edited out (all of the bits in brackets where Rowling goes off on one - they broke up the narrative and should have been cut or woven in elsewhere), and I was a little uncomfortable with the class stereotypes and the insistence that working-class people Do Not Speak Prop-aaahhh. It got annoying - fast. And the end tipped into melodrama and is best forgotten, but everything leading up to that was good enough for me to able to forgive. And not a bloody wizard in sight.