Phew, I finally made it through this book! My apologies to everyone who loved this, but unfortunately, I did not, and no one's sadder than me.
Reading Where the Crawdads Sing was like stepping back in time to high school, when class-assigned books meant lots of award-winning fiction. Sure, there were plenty of literary merit found in these pages, but little joy was actually experienced from reading them.
Starting at the age of six, Kya was slowly abandoned by everyone in her family, until she was the sole person left living in a little shack at the edge of town. As the years went by, shunned by the entire town, she slowly became known as the "Marsh Girl," a wild and lonely creature that few knew and most feared. This is her story. And when the town's golden boy dies, old prejudices flair up, and Kya finds herself at the receiving end of the town's anger and suspicion.
This story is descriptive prose at its most verbose, and no detail—the marsh, waterways, bugs, trees, animals, and sea shells—was too small to be included. But the story has little plot and even less character development. Especially in the beginning, when Kya didn't talk to or interact with a single person, the monotony of the writing almost did me in.
The other big issue is that the story is pretty hard to believe. We're supposed to accept that Kya is able to fend for herself, which includes cooking, cleaning, going to the store, buying things, and coming up with ways to make money, all at the age of six. That is way beyond the realm of possibility, let alone probability. There's only so far my beliefs can be suspended, I tell you.
That's not to say I didn't enjoy a single thing here because I did. I found the middle of the book to be the most engaging. That was when Kya started interacting with others and the writing became a little bit more interesting as a result. Tate and Jumpin' were my favorite characters, and every scene they were in grabbed me. But the juxtaposition of their scenes (alive and compelling) against the ones without them (descriptive and unchanging) made the latter feel even more dull and plodding by comparison.
In the end, this book just isn't for me. Everything that others loved are all the same things I didn't. I prefer my books to have interesting plot advancement, nuanced character growth, and zippy writing, none of which this book had. Instead, the plot is straightforward, the characters all remain stubbornly the same throughout, and the writing is long-winded enough to deflate even the most enthusiastic of readers.
Readaroo Rating: 3 stars
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