Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

 

This was a book I'd heard some decent things about, and while it's not a horrible novel, it's really not a crime story, it's more of a conventional coming-of-age thing, kinda steeped in a sort of small-town Southern coastal-rural poverty. It's told in two timelines from at least two POVs, but that complexity doesn't really add much other than the need to keep track of when you are and whose head you're inside of. There's vibes of something like a love story, here, but it's not really a great one. There is a crime in the novel, maybe, and at the end at least one character thinks he knows who did it, but in order for his theory to be true at least one character would have to behave really oddly and a snippet of poetry (poetry) to be literally true. That solution seems out-of-character and implausible. So it's ambiguous, from the reader's perspective. The voice here seems deeply coastal Southern, both in narration and in dialogue; the characters other than the mains don't really seem particularly distinct, but the primary POV wouldn't see them as such. Oh well, not horrible will have to do.