Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Where the Crawdads Sing is an excellent book, but it could have been better. The author’s expertise as a naturalist really shines throughout it, but sometimes, things get lost in that light. The novel is many things — a coming of age story, a murder mystery, a commentary on human relationships in a small town, and a lyrical description of life in eastern North Carolina — and perhaps, the author tried to do a little too much. There are times that her descriptive passages obscure the plot, causing me to gloss over passages that maybe I shouldn’t have to, to get to the meat of the story. And as a North Carolina resident, I found inconsistencies. Owens has her characters traveling to Asheville quite a bit. Sometimes there is a solid reason for this, but sometimes it’s just to visit a city. Problem is, Asheville is just about the furthest NC city (7-8 hours, by car) that they could choose — there are many closer alternatives. Owens occasionally writes in dialect, but the dialects in Crawdads are not those I’ve heard spoken in that part of North Carolina – nowhere did I find a trace of the Elizabethan “hoi toider” speech commpn to that area. I also thought that the story ended quite abruptly – I would have appreciated more time with a middle-aged and older Marsh Girl. Lest you put these criticisms down to mere quibbling, I still think the novel is exceptional, but I also think the points mentioned above justify docking it one star. Read this book. You will be doing yourself a great injustice if you don’t.
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