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Friday, February 7, 2020

Where the Crawdads Sing

For quite some time, I resisted buying Where the Crawdads Sing. I resisted for two reasons: 1) The clunky title, and 2) The effusive blurbs on the book cover, very often a sign that the reader is about to be bitterly disappointed. "A rare achievement" (The Times), "Unforgettable" (Daily Mail), "Painfully beautiful" (New York Times Book Review. 

There is indeed something distinctly painful about this novel. It is painfully boring, painfully inept, painfully commonplace. From about the halfway mark, I had to force myself forward. And it was painful.

Here we have the story of Kya Clark, otherwise known as 'Marsh Girl', who grows up with an alcoholic father and a tyrannized mother and X number of brothers and sisters (I'm not sure of the number and I don't care, and neither, apparently, did the author). Family life, however, does not last long, for soon mother disappears, as does father, more gradually, along with the X number of siblings. Kya is left alone to make her way in the wild marshland of the North Caroline coast. She proceeds through childhood to young adulthood, munching on mussels and clams and hominy grits and turns into a beautiful young woman who has never been sick a day in her life (curiously enough, given the rough conditions and sparce diet).

Her main goal in life, other than becoming an expert on the marsh and all its flora and critters, seems to be to meet and marry this or that young man. She falls in love first with Tate and then with Chase, and is ultimately rejected by both, after they've gotten what they came for, because she just dont fit into lafe in the reel werl. Each of these love affairs is liberally salted with all the proper cliches as each winds its sluggish way to an end. The author herself, Delia Owens, is a wildlife scientist, and I suppose this is what happens when a wildlife scientist tries to write a love story. 

At some point, one suspects, somewhere between the rough and the final drafts of her manuscript, someone must have mentioned to the author that her story had no point, and she therefore inserted a murder mystery into the novel. That's how it feels, anyway. It's just suddenly there, and we are reminded of its presence every 50 pages or so. After the love stories run out of steam, the novel morphs to courtroom drama, for Kya herself has been accused of committing the inserted murder. The trial chugs along, rather like a case from the old Matlock television series, and at last, thankfully, the novel gasps its last breath. 

Immensely forgettable. Astonishingly banal. This novel has a bit of everything, other than those things serious readers actually want to read. 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Couldn't agree more! Had to read this for my book club and I loathed it. Could not understand all the good reviews (but everyone in my book club loved it so I kept my mouth shut). This book was promoted by Reese Witherspoon who I think is going to make a movie of it. Just ugh.