A review by jessicaludden
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

adventurous dark mysterious reflective tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Going into this I didn’t have a lot of trust in the author. This book was entertaining enough. There were definitely times I got bored and just wanted to get to the point. There were lots of drawn out descriptions of mundane things like what Kya was making for breakfast and just every day things that I didn’t think we needed to know. Going back and forth between the present murder investigation and Kya’s childhood in the past was a nice contrast, although at times I felt like we were in the past for a little too long, just to catch up with the present and have every single detail of the court case told to us. What is with authors and their need to put weird age gaps in relationships. Like, I get Kya and Tate kinda grew up knowing each other, but 14 and 18? Seriously? Also it’s always going to be weird to me when a white author uses the N word in their writing. I get it’s set in the 60s, but you can show racism without doing all that and I definitely didn’t trust her to do that justice. I will say the best part of this book was the ending. It definitely took me by surprise and I guess the whole point of seeing so much of Kya’s childhood was so that we viewed her as this innocent Marsh Girl. The ending definitely left me thinking and I think it was a good decision to imply that Kya actually did kill Chase. She would’ve been living in fear for the rest of her life and, like she said, it’s one thing to live in isolation, but fear too? Overall, I enjoyed reading this most of the time even though I have my problems with it. 
Expand filter menu Content Warnings