Where the Crawdads Sing

Spoiler Alert: It's impossible to tell anything about this story without a few potential SPOILERS.

Kya has been abandoned by everyone who ever loved her - her mother, her sisters and brothers, her father, the other people in a nearby town - everyone. That's just fine with her. She has been on her own since she was six, cooking, finding and selling mussels to get money for essentials, scrounging through her family's old clothing for covering. She's the town joke, spending only one day in school, living in the swamp, a larger-than-life character, the Marsh Girl.

Then she grows up and meets two men who will change her life. Can she dare to love, she who has always felt herself to be unlovable?

I am torn. I loved this book. I found this book deeply flawed. The setting is mesmerizing. The characters of Kya, her father, Jumpin', Tate...I was fascinated with the depiction of all these people. But some of the things the characters did seemed false, set up for the sake of the storyline, and that disappointed me. In an unlikely manner, Kya herself grew into a cultured young woman, and that jarred me deeply. The ending, though, was spot-on.

So, loved-it-hated-it.