Where the Crawdads Sing
I like Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens more than I thought I would. I’m typically not crazy about books with a strong dialect and this one, set in the marshes of North Carolina, certainly has a twang. That might sound simpleton-y of me, but I’m willing to make myself vulnerable for you people-- my lovely, voracious readers. I respect the effort of a dialect and its contribution to character development, but it’s also just harder to read, straight up. It can lead to pauses and distractions when I’d prefer to read fluidly. However, if the writing is particularly strong, I don’t even notice-- like with To Kill a Mockingbird.
Anyway, I came into it with reservations and came out pleasantly surprised. Like when a Zoom happy hour doesn’t suck as much as you thought it would. The story is genuinely suspenseful-- you know from the first page (and the blurb on the cover) that a murder goes down, but you don’t uncover the details until much later, so it’s buzzing in the back of your brain mid-read. It’s a well-executed mystery up until the very end. But even though it *contains* a mystery, the novel is primarily a romance.
I don’t really like romances, perhaps because I’m a jaded bitch? They often come across as very YA and quickly devolve into cheeseballiness. In this novel, I rooted for the characters, and that helped make the romance palatable. I thought they were genuinely good people who deserved love. They wooed each other in unconventional ways, so I didn’t roll my eyes too much.
Where the Crawdads Sing was #1 on Amazon’s Most Sold Fiction Books list for 2019 and that seems a little much. It was good, but it wasn’t that good. Everybody calm down. I respect that it kept me guessing until literally the last page, but I also don’t think it’s quite 4-flame caliber. Sometimes the writing fell flat for me, especially in the dialogue, and sometimes I grew weary of the landscape descriptions. Overall, Where the Crawdads Sing receives 3 out of 5 flames.
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