Warning:   This is about 25% mystery and 75% romance of different sorts.   I didn’t get it for either reason,  but rather because of the hype.  And it was about 35% pretty good and 65% poor.  There’s a death (murder?) and legal crime story as a frame for a romance which includes a wild girl known as “Marsh Girl” who has been abandoned by almost everyone and grows up in the salt marshes of eastern North Carolina. A couple local young men get involved with her – that’s the love story part. The crime part includes the procedural aspects and the court case after one of  the men is found dead.   

For the first 150 pages or so I was impressed, this is the story of Kya as a young girl in a seriously bad situation and there are lovely descriptions of the setting. Then Kya gets involved with Tate on a level deeper than learning to read and then along comes Chase.  Shoot, just as I feared, it’s basically a Young Adult romance novel.  But because it’s kinda-sorta nicely written and has a mystery/crime tale as a frame story there was a hook for me and I hung in there. 

*******
Where the Crawdads Sing
by Delia Owens
2018 / 379 pages
read by Cassandra Campbell – 12h 12m
rating:  5 (very mixed)  / contemp fiction
(read and listened) 
*******

I’m not going to judge the book or folks who love it because I personally really enjoy crime novels which are some-times as clichéd and with possibly less literary significance than this book.   This just isn’t my genre.  (And my rating is based on what I like in books,  not any kind of ultimate value.) 

I was quite pleased for about 1/3 of the book and then it turned into the YA thing.  But it did get excellent reviews as general fiction and I enjoyed most of the procedural crime and courtroom drama parts,  but the sheriff was really stupid. The last few chapters were rather original again and I enjoyed them. 

A big disappointment for me,  but not a total waste.   As I said in my rating –  the review is mostly negative but the rating is mixed.