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‘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 of the movie of a novel I’ve written. I’m still waiting for Camilla Parker-Bowles, the Duchess of Cornwall, to pick one of my novels for her book club and to tell the world: “I couldn’t put it (or my handkerchief) down!”
I do have a few modest credentials for chiming in on Owens’ novel: I’ve been the book critic for Glamour, the book editor of Ohio’s largest newspaper, and a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle. And unlike Owens, a resident of Idaho, I live in the South.
So, with the paperback edition of Where the Crawdads Sing just out and the movie adaptation in the works, I’ll risk saying it: This is the most overrated book of the decade. Not because it’s unremittingly bad, but because it’s had praise all of out of proportion to its slender merits: its hymn to nature, its brisk courtroom drama, and its twist ending, which has made some people want to reread the book to figure out how they missed the clues.
