Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

I have heard about this for the last year, like everyone else, because I'm pretty sure every person everywhere has read it. But I'd pretty much decided I wasn't going to bother reading it, until my OB brought me her copy of this book because she'd seen me reading at my appointments and said, "I loved this book; you need to read it!" Since she remembered and gave me her copy to read, I wanted to follow through with her, because it was so nice of her. I read it in just two days, and actually was surprised by how much I liked it. The story follows Kya, who is abandoned by her family and left alone at the age of 7 to live in a shack on the marsh of North Carolina, and is kind of a mix of her coming-of-age, a romance, a murder mystery, and a natural history of the marshes all mixed together in one. I thought the descriptions of the marsh and the nature writing were the best part of this book; Owens is a nature non-fiction writer by trade (and this is her first novel) so you can tell that this is her powerhouse. I really enjoyed the descriptions of the marsh and how the marsh was basically a character in the book.

The thing that put me off this book was the clunky dialogue and characters. I didn't notice the dialogue being a problem during the first half of the book--probably because Kya was a child and so it didn't seem as awkward--but once the romances started happening, I was super annoyed by the awkward things the characters were saying. It was hard for me to focus on the story because I was so distracted by the unbelievable things they were saying. The two male love interests were so one-dimensional; one was all good and one was all bad. And Kya didn't seem as damaged or as affected by her childhood and history of being abandoned one by one by each of her family members and everyone who she loved as she should have been. I read someone's review saying that she was a cousin of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl--the Shy Damaged Brilliant Wild Girl. And that's exactly what I thought about Kya. She went to one day of school but was taught how to read and became this amazing naturalist just by reading biology textbooks, and was so gorgeous that every man who sees her loves her.

But I got sucked in to the story and couldn't put it down. Even with the things that were bothering me, I had to finish it (even though it was kind of obvious where it was going). It was still a good read.