4 stars.
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens was a very good if not slightly slow read. It also proves that you’re never too old to start - this was her debut novel at age sixty-nine (she wrote several nonfiction books about biology in Africa). I just simply found the development of the plot quite slow at times, but not too slow as to induce tedium.
What I will give Owens credit for is her lush and rich prose. She has (and I know that this is a cliche) a poet’s eye for detail and it shows in her descriptions of nature and the world at large. It was never boring to read, because of its descriptions of absolutely everything - such as that the “marsh’s soft air fell silklike around her shoulders…moonlight chose an unexpected path through the pines, laying shadows about in rhymes.” (157)
The main reason I knocked a star, aside from the slow development, was that the characters appeared simply drawn. Aside from Kya (the main protagonist), readers never got much character development, whether that be her father (an angry drunk), her love interest (a humble “good boy”) or another love interest (a proud “bad boy”).
What one notices very quickly when reading is that there are two stories being told for most of the book. They do not converge until about two-thirds of the way through. One could say they converge earlier, but they do not truly converge until that point. The main story of the first two-thirds also has many gaps, but then again, I wouldn’t want to hear every last detail.
The courtroom scenes in Where the Crawdads Sing’s third act are kind of repetitive. I won’t discuss what the case is, as that veers almost into spoiler territory, but suffice to say that Owens did not need to detail the testimony of every last witness. However, during those scenes, and even before, there are a lot of little twists and developments.
For most of the book, at least half, I was debating whether to give it three or four stars. I settled on four, not only because of the merits that I have discussed, but also because it has a through line of being strangely uplifting in unexpected ways. For example, Chapter 33 is a story in itself, and there are other things that happen that make you want to keep reading just when you feel like the story is getting gloomy.
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