Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens Improbable, unlikely, unbelievable. There so many holes in the plot and in the writing that it falls apart in the first quarter. After an awful, neglected childhood, Kya survives taking care of herself from a very young age, finds a young man, Tate, who not only rescues her but teaches her to read, love poetry, and introduces her to university-level books. She’s Eve in paradise, a wild girl-child to be rescued, Pygmalion to Tate, educated and formed by him. He is even on hand to teach her about “becoming a woman“. All the time she remains isolated from all others and has no money except what she earns by scraping together pennies from selling mussels and fish. Unbelievable that a girl survives alone in the swamps, unbelievable she’s never seen, never caught by a person who would do her harm, yet she reads, recites poetry and feeds herself. There’s no description of how she earns money as she grows besides selling mussels and fish in her early years. There’s no indication that she uses her learned knowledge to lift herself out of the swamps and improve her life, earn a keep. There are many things that just don’t gel — the parents who are fairly middle-class, doing well until the depression where they lose all, move to the swamps where the father turns into the cliched drunk loser speaking swamp patois while the mother remains elegant, painting watercolours, hiding Easter eggs in the garden. There’s terminology that would have not been used or even known in 1965/69. Poetry is littered throughout the text (some very bad poetry that’s easy to identify as the author’s). It would have been much more authentic if there was local Appalachian stories, songs, ditties and lore.