Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
I like the prose and the premise. I was seduced by the murder that happens right at the beginning, but I’m getting tired of the “romance” vibe I’m getting from it.
I think none of the characters themselves has any real flaws. The girl, Kya, has grown up in the woods, on the marsh, away from civilisation. Her parents are gone and she’s all alone. But apart from that, she’s perfectly fine. More than fine, she’s smart and kind and skilled, pretty and determined and innocent. The boy, the love-interest Tate, is also perfect. The blond curls, the kind and knowing eyes, the noble intentions, the understanding when she gets her first period. I’m on page 130-ish, maybe something happens now. But it seems to me that it’s just the circumstances that are somewhat problematic. The characters themselves have no flaws.
Maybe I’m used to anti-heroes. Yossarian and Ignatius and, now, Joe from You. Is this what a normal novel is like?
Her prose is nice but it does sometimes feel like she resolves tension a little too soon. And by tension, I don’t mean… Ok here’s an example. In stand up, the power of the callback is that much more if you wait a long time. The longer you wait to call back, the better the punchline, right? Think about that when you read this:
She’s learning how to read now and is learning a lot from a nature book called A Sand County Almanac:
His soft words, sounding almost like poetry, taught her that soil is packed with life and one of the most precious riches on Earth; that draining wetlands driest land for miles beyond, killing plants and animals along with the water. Some of the seeds lie dormant in the desiccated earth for decades, waiting, and when the water finally comes home again, they burst through the soil, unfolding their faces. Wonders and real-life knowledge she would’ve never learned in school. Truths everyone should know, yet somehow, even though they lay exposed all around, seemed to lie in secret like the seeds.
That’s nice, but it just happens too soon, you know? This is just one instance of this exasperation I feel, but it happens again and again.
I just finished the book. I didn’t really care much for it. I was going to say that it’s not because of the inherent quality of the book. That it was just me.But it could be the book, the more I think about it. And it could also be books I read before this.
As I said, I didn’t really care for the characters. After I finished, I immediately went on to Goodreads to see if other people felt the same way about it. It’s got a rating of 4.5+ and I goggled. For context, Catch-22 is rated 3.98. I checked the 1-star and 2-star reviews and there were enough of them for me to feel consoled, especially because they were perfect depictions of how I felt as well. Someone in a review wrote that it felt like two authors wrote the book, one professional nature writer writing the descriptions of the marsh and the animals and another writing the character development and romance part. This seems spot on to me. Here’s another review that put it better than I can:
