aboveumbrella 's review for:

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
DID NOT FINISH

I thoroughly did not enjoy this book. Ooooph. I don't recall my view of a book ever being this far from the general consensus.

I found the story to be slow, absurd, and entirely uninteresting.

I made it a third of a way before having to abandon ship. This passage about Kya, a girl that essentially raised herself in the swamp, literally just learning to read was the last straw:

— — — — — — — —

Slowly, she unraveled each word of the sentence: "There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot."

"Oh," she said. "Oh."

"You can read, Kya. There will never be a time again when you can't read."

"It ain't just that." She spoke almost in a whisper. "I wadn't
aware that words could hold so much. I didn't know a sentence could be so full."

He smiled. "That's a very good sentence. Not all words hold that much."

— — — — — — — —

Barf. Most YA novels aren’t *that* heavy handed.