I think publishers around the world will be working frantically to find novels in which shy but brilliant young women live lives of hardship in isolated communities (preferably American, preferably coastal) and get involved in crimes of passion while at the same time pursuing an academic interest in zoology. Oh, and also writing her own poetry. Because that seems to be the magic formula for selling books if the extraordinary success of Where the Crawdads Sing is anything to go by.

BUT – spoiler alert – that doesn’t mean the novel is any good. In fact a recent Reddit post entitled “Always shocked to discover a bestseller is actually awful” summed it up for me:

“Read if you like migraine inducing romance, insipid mystery, sh*t dialogue, unrealistic flat characters, and enough plot holes to backfill a swamp dry. I envied Kya’s mother for walking out of this book on page 6 and not having to suffer through the rest of it like I did.”

Much of the novel is written in a folksy vernacular – y’all – which grated until either I got used to it or the author quietly dropped it. My impression is that it was the latter. Either way that wasn’t the main problem. To explain the central flaw in the novel I need to give a quick plot outline. Briefly it tells the story of Kya Clark, a young girl who lives in the North Carolina swamplands in the 1960s. She is abandoned by her family, and grows up almost entirely isolated from society, ignored by the local villagers who refer to her as ‘swamp girl’. In a parallel plot line set around ten years in the future, a local man has been murdered and Kya is a suspect.

For the novel to work in any way we need to be able believe in Kya, that she could survive on her own, and become an academic prodigy with the minimum of support. But this is asking too much – she is abandoned by her whole family at the age of six (or thereabouts) and manages to survive in a harsh environment on her own. The lack of intervention by the authorities – Child Protective Services or the 1960’s equivalent – is explained by Kya’s ability to hide; each time the school attendance officer comes out to Kya’s shack she hides in the swamp until they leave. After a while they give up. That just didn’t ring true. She goes into town once a week to buy groceries – usually just a bag of ‘grits’ – wouldn’t they have just waited for her there? Equally her transformation from an abandoned child to an academic expert on the local flora and fauna is utterly implausible. Learning is more than being able to read – surely that hardly needs saying does it? And once I lost any belief in the central character, the purpose of rest of the novel just dissolved away.

The parallel plot – the murder mystery – is even less plausible. I’m not going to spoil the plot by telling you why, but I just refuse to believe anyone will read this novel, find out the ‘answer’ to whether Kya killed the philandering sex abuser that tries to rape her, and be surprised at the outcome, however many red herrings the author introduces. Or maybe I will.

So apart from the ridiculous plot and unbelievable characters, is the novel well written? Of course not! It is totally overwritten. Some brief examples should suffice:

Sometimes she heard night-sounds she didn’t know or jumped from lightning too close, but whenever she stumbled, it was the land who caught her. Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand. Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother“

“Autumn leaves don’t fall, they fly. They take their time and wander on this their only chance to soar.”

“Faces change with life’s toll, but eyes remain a window to what was…”

‘Autumn leaves don’t fall, they fly’. No they bloody don’t! If ever a sentence was written to go on a bookmark or a t-shirt that was it.

I am really sorry if you enjoyed Where the Crawdads Sing – I appreciate you will hate this post, and find it mean-spirited. I also know the author’s primary purpose – to write a novel that helps protect the North Carolina marshland which is under threat from development – was well-intentioned, and I have probably over-stated the novel’s weaknesses without giving credit where it is due for its strengths. But my wariness over the popular fiction best-seller list remains as strong as ever.

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, 2018