David Putnam's Reviews > Where the Crawdads Sing

This starts out as a wonderful book well worth a five-start rating. The voice of the coming of age Kya is truly amazing. Had the craft been sustained through to the end of the book this could have easily been compared to, To Kill a Mocking Bird.
The setting is marvelous and carries the same weight as a main character. Absolutely wonderful descriptions.
The author does a magnificent job creating the character of Kya, with details that make her come alive on the page. This book would have worked fine just as a coming of age novel minus the mystery of the murder.
The insertion of the secondary plotline is disruptive and breaks the flow of the story. Part of the problem is the dramatic shift in voice from Kya to the sheriff. Kya is handled masterfully, the sheriff, not so much. These disruptive scenes are kept short but they are still speed bumps that urged me to put the book down.
The author is a wonderful craftsman. At about page 150 the author wanted to emphasize one part of a scene and shifted from past tense to present tense just for a few paragraphs. The transition and its impact were wonderful, and done so well it was practically invisible.
The story is character driven which is my favorite kind of book, however when handling the mystery part of the story, the protagonist doesn’t dig up the clue. Two different witnesses at two different times, and long after the crime has occurred, comes forward and says, “Oh, I might have seen something that night. I just didn’t think it was important.” For me this too is a minor distraction but it could have easily been avoided.
The character voice matures as the character gets older and is real and believable. This is difficult to do and the way it is done here is truly an art form.
I all but put the book down three quarters of the way through when the murder case was described. I just couldn’t buy it. The quick alternating scenes in that last quarter of the book, the jail and court scenes too often disrupted the fictive dream and tossed me out of the story. There is a definite tone change that comes from a shift in the craft. The voice is lost with the shifting from character to character, too many points of view. And the use of cliché’s like “I walked into a door,” and “I jus’ didn’t fall off a turnip truck.” didn’t match the wonderful craft in the first three quarters of the book. It almost feels as if the ending had not been planned, or more likely was rushed.
The ending was predictable because of the way the protagonist pov was handled (or avoided), and that there really wasn’t any other possibility, no red herrings to choose from so it left only one possible outcome. There wasn’t twist at the end. I wasn’t surprised at all. So reluctantly I have to give this one four stars instead of a five plus.
David Putnam author of the Bruno Johnson series