‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ Is the Most Overrated Novel of the Decade
A №1 bestseller has racial stereotypes, romance-novel clichés — and Reese Witherspoon as a producer of the movie
For much of my childhood, I spent part of every summer living in a two-room shack without indoor plumbing or running water, which stood at the end of a dirt road in the hauntingly beautiful woods known as the Pine Barrens in southern New Jersey.
My experiences in some ways resembled those of Catherine “Kya” Clark, the young heroine of Where the Crawdads Sing, a novel that sold more print copies than any adult book in America — fiction or nonfiction — when it first appeared in 2019.
Like Kya, I spent most of my time without parents nearby — my grandmother ruled our shack — and I read to fend off loneliness, though I preferred Archie and Veronica comics to the Albert Einstein treatises favored by the recluse known as “The Marsh Girl.” Inspired partly by that reading in the woods, I grew up to write books brought out by respected publishers.
Still, next to Kya, I’m a slacker. Reese Witherspoon did not catapult any of my books to stardom by tapping it for her Hello Sunshine book club, as she did for Where the Crawdads Sing. Nor has Witherspoon become the executive producer…
