Where the Crawdads Sing

Just a warning to potential audiobook listeners: the narration is atrocious, and the voices Cassandra Campbell gives the characters are so cartoonish and distracting.

Now for the actual book: I honestly didn't mind all the naval gazing (or rather swamp gazing) that goes on, and the way those parts are written, but that is about as much as I can say for what I enjoyed. People throw the label “Mary Sue” around way too much, and often apply it inaccurately to any female character who has any skill at all – but Kya's picture should be pasted into the dictionary next to “Mary Sue”. She magically raises herself in a swamp from the age of 6, doesn't go to school or start learning to read until she's 14 (but then learns to read after a couple of hours of being show the alphabet), somehow has never had a serious injury (she had a huge puncture wound from stepping on a nail, but magically was fine after just sticking her foot in some dirty swamp water) or illness, and seems to also have no real emotional or socialization problems despite barely interacting with people for most of her life. Oh, and of course she's extremely beautiful (but she doesn't know it, of course), she's innocent and pure (not like the other girls) but extremely mature, she has real interests like fish and birds (instead of high heels and clothes like said other girls). And that is all just when she's a child – it somehow gets worse when she's an adult!

Additionally, I found the teenage romance portion to be very...creepy. I just really hate the Born Sexy Yesterday trope, and that basically makes up the entirety of the “romance” origin story we have to go through. This extremely beautiful, wild teenager can't read, doesn't go to school, doesn't have any friends or family or connections outside of Jumpin' and Mabel, is extremely innocent and naive because she has no experience in the real world – and this older boy, basically the only person near her own age she's ever spent any time with, swoops in to teach her how to be a person, while thinking about how stunningly beautiful she is, and telling his dad that Kya is innocent and amazing (unlike other girls who are loose and shallow), and then they get naked (while she is shy and he is leading her, obviously). No thank you.

Overall, the characters were bland, the dialogue was clunky, the plot was mediocre, and no amount of pretty scientific descriptions of marshes were going to make up for the complete lack of realism in every other aspect of this book.