WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING by Delia Owens

Everyone else on the planet seems to love this book, but I feel like I’m being generous to give it 4 stars.  I just didn’t think it was special enough to warrant all the praise that others have lavished on it, and I felt as though I were reading a novel for young adults.  In any case, the book opens with the discovery of a dead body--that of Chase Andrews, who may or may not have been murdered.  Then we backtrack several decades to the life of Kya, a girl who basically raises herself in the swamplands of North Carolina.  She then later falls in love with Chase, but their relationship is doomed, as there is no chance that the “Marsh Girl” will ever get to marry Chase, the former star quarterback who can have any respectable girl he wants.  The plot is supremely predictable, including the ending, in which we finally discover what actually happened to Chase.  Frankly, he is such an odious, one-dimensional character that I really wasn’t exactly dying to know who had the biggest motive to kill him or if his death was an accident.  I had several theories about what happened to him, and one of them was right.  The number of characters is refreshingly small, and my favorites were a black man nicknamed Jumpin’, who owns a small store and serves as sort of a surrogate father to Kya, and Tate, who becomes Kya’s tutor and first boyfriend.  Tate bows out of the picture for a while, leaving Kya to become involved with the despicable Chase.  I just didn’t warm up to Kya, who makes some other rather bad choices, such as hiding from truant officers to avoid going to school.  She seems to crave interaction with other people and yet chooses isolation.